


Frozen Ghosts

by wildimaginingsofhalfbakedideas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes and the 21st Century, Depressed Steve Rogers, Domestic Avengers, Kinda, M/M, No Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Suspended Animation, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:00:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28725483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildimaginingsofhalfbakedideas/pseuds/wildimaginingsofhalfbakedideas
Summary: Steve Rogers never quite left the ice when they dragged him out of the arctic. He's good at going through the motions, good at fighting when they need him to fight, but he was supposed to die in 1944, just like Bucky had two weeks earlier. Now, as he moved through this barely recognizable world, he wondered if he had and all that was left was a ghost, haunting a life that didn't belong to him.*Bucky Barnes hadn't told anyone about the second-rate serum Zola had injected under his skin while Bucky had been strapped to that table. He hadn't told anyone about all the changes he'd noticed, how he felt stronger, faster, needed less sleep. He hadn't told anyone and yet somehow, that secret had carried him through seventy years of snow and isolation back to his best friend, who wasn't quite the same person he'd known on that train.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark
Comments: 23
Kudos: 106





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, this started because I wanted Bucky to suffer less and Steve's PTSD and depression to be acknowledged more. Thus, the monstrosity I am about to unleash.
> 
> There is a possibility the rating may change later but I haven't written that far yet so who knows really.

> I'll be a better man today  
>  I'll be good, I'll be good  
>  And I'll love the world, like I should  
>  Yeah, I'll be good, I'll be good  
>  For all of the times that I never could
> 
> _I'll Be Good - Jaymes Young_

Steve finished his run and headed straight for the shower, as always. It was the same routine every day: wake up, drink a glass of water, go for a marathon-length run, shower, convince himself to eat something, start his day. Without some sort of structure to his days, he would surely begin to lose his mind, if he hadn’t already. The fact that he was even awake ( ~~alive~~ ) after crashing in the arctic _seventy years ago_ was already enough to make him feel like perhaps he deserved to be in an institution. Then to almost immediately have to fight aliens alongside the strangest team he’d ever seen in his life? He wished his body was capable of getting drunk. As it was, it was probably a good thing that he couldn’t.

It had been exactly two weeks since the Battle of New York, or the Incident, depending on who you asked. They actually had all taken Tony up on his suggestion to get shawarma after it all ended, which was even better than Steve had expected, and they’d all enjoyed the quiet contentment of trust and rest well earned. They were a patchwork team of some of the strangest people Steve had ever met, but in the end they’d pulled it off. He’d reflected afterwards that it actually made a lot of sense. Hadn’t Steve pulled together a seemingly random team that the higher ups had shaken their heads at but allowed just because he was Captain America? From a tactical standpoint, he could see what all of them brought to the table. He’d just been so busy trying to catch his feet, blindsided by _aliens_ and men that turn into green giants and Tony’s fucking attitude that he didn’t know how to do anything else except retreat as far as possible into the Captain America mantle and take things one breath at a time. Then, of course, Tony had been right about what SHIELD was planning to use the Tesseract for, which brought up nightmares of guns that obliterated soldiers so completely there weren’t even ashes to send back home. All in all, it wasn’t until they were sitting in that miraculously intact restaurant eating shawarma that Steve had been able to look around and see the team for what it really was, for all that it could be.

Of course, there was no need for a permanent Avengers team in New York, so Thor had gone back to Asgard, Tony had locked himself in his tower to recover and rebuild, and Clint went back to Bed-Stuy and whatever missions he’d been doing before all of this. Steve was a bit surprised that Banner stuck around, taking Stark up on his offer to let him stay in one of the undamaged sections of the building. Then again, Steve mused, Tony had been the only one to walk right up to someone who was feared not only by others but himself, and poke him with a stick. Foolish though it was, Tony had proven that he wasn’t going to shy away from any aspect of Banner’s life and that, above all, what he appreciated most was his intellect. 

Natasha was still around as well. Sometimes. She disappeared for the first three days after the Incident, but then she showed up on Steve’s doorstep the day after with a bag of Chinese takeout and an insolent grin. He wasn’t sure why she’d chosen to spend her afternoon with him rather than Clint, who seemed to be the person she was closest to, but he wasn’t going to complain. They ate their way through the lo mein and mongolian beef while Natasha kicked her feet up into his lap as though they’d been friends for years instead of days. He still remembered her asking him in a tone too casual to be anything of the sort what he thought of the new millennium.

“Same with everything I guess,” he responded, digging out the last, stray noodle from the box in his hand. “There’s the good and the bad. More aliens than I expected.”

She’d grinned at him and flicked a noodle at his face with unerring accuracy. It hit him between the eyes and stuck for a moment before falling into his lap. They were both still for a moment before bursting out with laughter that was better than anything else he’d experienced since waking up.

He sighed and braced his hands against the shower wall, letting the water flow over his neck and down his back. Instant access to hot water whenever he wanted it was definitely one of the good things about the future. He just hated that unlike back in Brooklyn when he was ninety-five pounds and sicker than a dog most days, the heat didn’t seep into his bones and stay there for a while. He still felt cold as he stepped out of the shower and dried off perfunctorily. Clothes were another thing that, while he could objectively say that the materials had largely improved, left him feeling wrong-footed. He’d never exactly been a paragon of fashion, but he’d known what was acceptable and what wasn’t. Here, and especially in New York, it was a lot harder for him to tell. So he tended to stick with simple, plain clothes. He pulled on a pair of tan trousers, which were much lower at the waist than he was accustomed to, and which he’d been informed were now called ‘khakis’, though the last time he’d heard that term it’d been used to describe British military uniforms. He completed the outfit with a white undershirt (no overshirt), a leather belt, and matching shoes. He’d seen a lot of the modern fashions, which ranged from the simple and comfortable to the wild and outrageous, but he hadn’t been brave enough to venture too far outside of his comfort zone just yet. He figured he’d done enough of that for a lifetime so far; no need to do so with his clothes.

He turned on the news briefly while he dressed, listening to politicians claim that the Avengers should be held responsible for the destruction of property in the city. The news anchor went on to explain the split opinion on social media, which leaned more heavily in support of the team and simply thanking them for not letting everyone be eaten by aliens from outer space. Steve assumed the whole debate was just because they couldn’t send a bill to the aliens who’d started the whole mess in the first place and needed someone to claim responsibility. He shook his head and finished tying his shoes, glancing up occasionally to see live coverage of damaged areas where the clean-up was still well underway. He didn’t mind helping out - the opposite, in fact. He’d spent countless hours in the past two weeks clearing rubble and debris, lending a hand wherever it was needed. It had become one of Steve’s major distractions during daylight hours and he liked knowing that his work was making a difference. Stark’s own sense of responsibility could be seen in the hundreds of robots he sent out to help as well. Steve would have been irritated before at the fact that Tony would literally rather build workers than do the work himself, but now he felt like he understood him a bit better. This _was_ his way of contributing and, in Stark’s eyes, his most valuable means of contributing, in addition to the funds donated to various charities started in the wake of the Incident.

Dressed, he went out to the kitchen and set out the ingredients to make his shake. He’d read about something called OCD while he was researching all the medical advancements since 1944 and as he looked at the neatly lined up, carefully measured items on the counter he idly wondered if the term could be applied to him. He dismissed the idea easily and poured everything into the blender before putting away the packages, washing out the measuring cup, and scrubbing the counter. It was just a routine. His SHIELD appointed counselor had stressed the importance of routine. He was just following orders.

He checked his phone while the blender chopped up fruit and protein powder for his shake. There were two texts from Natasha, which were always baffling to read and probably assisted him the most in understanding modern text speech since he had to look up nearly every emoticon and abbreviation. Sometimes he felt almost fluent in the new code, while other times he couldn’t decipher her message at all. Thankfully, today’s texts were straightforward and he answered them easily before looking at his other notifications, which consisted mainly of alerts from social media, an invention which he both loved and hated in equal measure, though he got the impression that this was not an uncommon opinion, and a text from Stark.

[STARK]: hey, capsicle. offering everyone a floor in the new avengers building. want in?

Steve stared down at his phone for a long moment, unsure of what he was even feeling. A part of him acknowledged that it was extremely kind of Stark to build homes for everyone on the team, especially since they’d only fought one battle together and couldn’t be said to be particularly close. He found it most surprising that he would offer Steve a space, since they’d been so antagonistic toward each other before everything went down. In fact, just thinking about that filled Steve with guilt for having judged Stark so harshly and being so wrong. He might still struggle to understand the man completely, but he understood him a hell of a lot better than he did a few weeks ago and that counted for something.

Still, he paused with his fingers over the tiny keyboard. The idea of living in a building surrounded by so many people, people he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure he could trust, made him sweat. His current apartment was a gift from SHIELD after he’d been defrosted. They’d asked him if he’d had any preferences, but at the time he’d been too numb to request anything except that it be in Brooklyn. He was just starting to get somewhat comfortable with it, even if the glaring differences between this same street in the 1930s and now made his heart ache and his head spin every time he thought about it too hard. Before he could come up with an answer, his phone vibrated.

[STARK]: thor doesn’t get one, obvs. clint has his own place in bed-stuy. but romanov, brucie, and you will all get one. if you want. plus some extras for future members

Steve found it much easier, somehow, to get a sense of Stark’s emotions through text than in person. Tony was always moving, causing distractions with his gesturing hands or pacing or fiddling or eating. He was very good at deflection and misdirection, like a street magician using sleight of hand. Through text, however, Steve could feel his nervous earnestness. It was clear that he really did want to do this for the team and wanted Steve to say yes, though Steve wasn’t sure why.

He looked around his apartment before answering. It was bare. White walls, pale hardwood floor, one couch, one bed, one dresser, and one tiny table in the kitchen for eating or setting up his laptop. The furniture itself was shockingly fragile and unstable, flimsy constructions that weren’t made to last. He’d examined the tiny bedside table once and found that it wasn’t even made of real wood. Fake furniture to fit a fake apartment. There were no pictures on the walls, no hand sewn quilts draped over the back of the couch handed down from someone else, no chipped ceramic bowl in the cabinet from when it was dropped that one time. No evidence that a person really lived here at all. He frowned.

[STEVE]: Alright. Thank you.

There was a brief pause and then:

[STARK]: awesome! come by tomorrow and talk to pepper

[STEVE]: What time?

Stark’s response was a string of numbers and instructions to call Pepper since ‘he was not Steve’s secretary’. It was such a typical Tony response that Steve had to smile a little and shake his head. It was then that he noticed that he’d left the blender running and his shake was now incredibly liquified and the ice in it had melted. He drank it anyway and headed out to see where he could help out downtown.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who is Steve Rogers and who is Captain America?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of the chapter talks about Steve wanting/attempting to commit suicide. Please be warned and keep yourselves safe

> Well you look like yourself
> 
> But you're somebody else
> 
> Only it ain't on the surface
> 
> Well you talk like yourself
> 
> No, I hear someone else though
> 
> Now you're making me nervous
> 
> _You’re Somebody Else - flora cash_

_“We’ll have the band play something slow. Wouldn’t want to step on your -”_

_The impact wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. The front of the plane slammed into the ice and broke the surface to slide deep into the freezing water below. He was jolted from the pilot seat and he flew back into one of the steel supports behind him before crashing back down to the metal floor. He rolled over onto his back and used his arms to awkwardly crab walk his way into a sitting position. He looked around. He had time. He had plenty of time to get out of the plane and swim, wait for the teams that would inevitably come to look for him._

_He shut his eyes and heard Bucky’s scream as the railing tore free before Steve could reach him and Steve had to watch, his heart freezing in his chest, as Bucky fell. Steve couldn’t follow him then, but he could follow him now. He kept his eyes shut as the water began to rush in. The plane was huge and even though the water came in fast and heavy, it still took a long time to reach his face._

_As he waited, he thought about a soldier in a bar in some little French village that he forgot the name of. The soldier had relished in telling the Howlies all about the time he’d drowned as a kid and how peaceful it was. He argued vehemently that it was the best way to die, even though no one was trying to argue against him. The soldier was drunk and loud, telling them all about how at first your body fights for air and then, once that’s over, all that’s left is peace._

_“C’est presque comme un orgasme,” he’d said. Steve didn’t quite believe that part, but he was willing to accept a bit of peace, if it came._

_Steve didn’t move as the water crept up over his chest, his neck, into his mouth, his nose. His body was already numb from the cold and even with his enhancements he wasn’t sure he_ could _move at this point even if he wanted to. Once the water was above his head he felt his lungs start to spasm, searching for oxygen, and his neurons fired warning after warning, telling him that something was wrong. It was dark in the plane, the sunlight blocked out by ice and water, the blinking controls destroyed. His eyelids blinked in the stygian blackness, a reflexive attempt to see despite the fruitlessness of the endeavor. Eventually his body worked against him and he breathed in, sucking what felt more like shards of ice than liquid water into his chest. He ignored it all and, what do you know, that soldier was right. All that was left after that was peace._

Steve woke up with a gasp and looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was. His lungs ached as though scarred from the inside, bleeding from a thousand tiny wounds. He forced his breathing to slow and he knew, logically, that the air he consumed was warm. His eyes blinked and the image of shadowed, twisted metal being swallowed by a hungry sea was replaced by smooth, white walls lit by dazzling morning sunlight streaming through a clear window that faced the east. He breathed again and looked at the bed (too large, too soft, too _much_ ), the glowing, futuristic phone on his nightstand, the wide, spacious bedroom, and he quickly put the pieces together. It was 2012, he was in New York, he wasn’t dead.

The terrible truth was that he’d never been dead. He hadn’t even been asleep, the way Stark thought. Not really. There were long stretches of time where his mind had sought refuge in the darkness, his thoughts fleeing and leaving him empty and at peace. His thoughts would always return, though, and he’d wake up to the piercing, fiery ice that gripped his flesh and the terror of immobility. He’d dreamed. So much of those years were spent in dreams. Good ones, where he was at home in Brooklyn with Bucky and they were both alive and healthy and safe. Ones where he was sitting back as the Howlies rested around a fire, watching them clown around and be idiots with each other. Ones where he’d moved fast enough, stretched farther, and his hand had clasped around Bucky’s to pull him back to safety and they’d both laughed about the close call rather than give into the shakes and tremors and tears.

Then, of course, there were the nightmares. The ones where he watched that singular, life altering moment over and over and over. The ones where it was somehow Steve’s own hands shoving Bucky out of the train. The ones where all the Howlies died in front of him as he screamed helplessly, where it was his fault, where their blood was on his hands. The ones where he stood in front of a mirror and peeled the fake skin off his face to reveal the horror beneath, just like the Red Skull. Ones where the serum Dr. Erskine had gifted him with had also cursed him so that now he lived eternally, deathless, as everyone else was buried in the earth.

In some ways, no matter the dream, it was still a refuge from the horrible reality of being present in his own body. How cruel, he thought, that he should have survived all of this when Bucky was gone. How insufferable. 

Steve ran a hand over his face and dressed in his running clothes before going to the kitchen for his usual glass of water. His runs were more for his mind than his body, since he was fairly certain he could run almost indefinitely without his body giving out on him, and today would be no exception. He began the run at a sprint, pushing to see how fast he could go. He took all of the side streets, avoiding people as much as possible since a man flying past at this speed was sure to cause alarm, and ran until his watch beeped at him to tell him it was time to head back. He never ran for more than an hour and his watch was set to go off after thirty minutes, since he had a habit of losing himself to his mind and forgetting to keep track of time entirely. Once, he’d ran for seven hours before he’d come back to himself. 

He turned around and ran home at a more reasonable pace, following the main roads. The steady rhythm of his feet on the pavement combined with the chaos of a New York morning helped his brain to quiet down a little and he no longer felt like he was ready to crawl out of his skin by the time he got back to his apartment. He kicked off his shoes and jumped in the shower, turning the water up as hot as it would go. His skin turned pink under the spray, but still the heat didn’t reach the icy cold lodged in the core of him. He hadn’t felt warm since the Valkyrie went down.

After his shower and breakfast, he called Pepper.

“Steve! I’m glad you called.”

“Hello, Ms. Potts. I was wondering what would be a good time to come by? Tony said he wanted me to look over some things for the apartments he’s building.”

“Please, call me Pepper.” He could hear the smile in her voice. He’d only met her a few times since the Incident, but each time she’d reminded him to call her by her first name. He found himself smiling back automatically. “And any time today would be fine. I’ll be at the tower all day working on this so whenever you’re free.”

He agreed to come over in about an hour, since he didn’t have anything else going on today anyway, and then started the walk from his apartment to Stark Tower. If he took his time, it would definitely be at least an hour’s walk.

The meeting with Pepper was surprisingly pleasant. It seemed that Tony was the type to never build the exact same thing twice (‘Why do that when you can _improve_?”) which was why he was taking this opportunity to completely redesign the entire tower, despite the fact that he had just finished building it prior to the attack on the city. 

“So, the others plan on living here full time?” Steve asked casually, flipping through a binder full of sample room designs. There were so many variations of color, aesthetic, spacing; he was getting overwhelmed with just this one collection. Pepper had eleven more binders stacked beside her.

“I think ‘full time’ is a bit of a loose term. At best I think most of them will think of it as a home base. Natalie - excuse me, Natasha, for one, I know has various safe houses all over the world and I’m certain Bruce is not going to give up travelling. Tony won’t be offended if you have a place elsewhere as well. To be honest, he’s just happy that you said yes in the first place.”

“Does it ever get tiring,” he asked, before he could stop the words from tripping out of his mouth, “being Stark’s emotional translator?”

Pepper let out a startled laugh and answered before he could apologize. “I haven’t thought about it like that. Not exactly. But yes, I suppose I do that sometimes. I think we could all use someone who understands us, don’t you?”

Steve repressed a shiver as the ice lodged in his chest made itself known. Yes, he did think everyone needed someone like that. Just a few weeks ago he’d had someone who knew him better than he knew himself. He picked up his glass of water and took a sip, trying not to think about the fact that he didn’t think anyone would ever truly understand him again. Not like that.

“Anyway,” Pepper continued smoothly, “do you have color preferences? A particular style? I would guess that the minimalist chrome isn’t really _you_ but I could be wrong.” She smiled at him and he managed to smile back, agreeing. They talked for a long while after that about color theory and Steve was surprised by the strength of his opinions on furniture once he saw the options and wasn’t limited by necessity.

Steve actually felt a tiny bit better when he left, likely a result of having actually had a real conversation with another human being rather than simply floating through life, insubstantial and absent, minus those harrowing days of extraterrestrial battle. He took the long way home, trying to take in the details of this new/old, familiar/unfamiliar city. The energy was the same. It was loud and brash and unapologetic. New York was still a place where people saw a line and pushed it just because they could. If he had expected anything, he would have expected it to be cleaner. If anything, though, it was dirtier. Smells came and went with sharp intensity as he walked, from the delicious scent of hot dogs from a street vendor to the stomach turning vapors of the sewers. It was like olfactory whiplash. Still, it was something familiar to hold onto, this dirty, crazy city. He adopted the unconscious walk of a native and kept his head down, his pace brisk, and took in everything without lifting his eyes from the sidewalk.

He arrived back home while there was still plenty of daylight left and eyed the empty sketchbook he’d bought a couple weeks after he’d first woken up. It had been the suggestion of the counselor he hadn’t been able to get out of meeting, but he hadn’t used it. He picked it up now and, with hesitant lines, started to draw.

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

A month after the Incident, an impressive amount of cleanup and renovation had been completed downtown. Almost no debris was left on the street, meaning there was almost nothing left for Steve to do. It was at that point that Director Fury swooped in with his proposal, one that Steve was too desperately bored and restless to deny.

Which was how, two weeks after that, Steve was on his first official SHIELD mission. He wondered if it could be called his first, since SHIELD had originally been the SSR, but decided not to think about it too hard. Steve was dismayed to learn just how many enemies SHIELD had. It seemed that while science had seemed to offer this modern world a plethora of advancements even Bucky had never dreamed of (he’d spent several days just researching medical science, marveling at how much easier his life would have been in this era), it also held the same wide array of evils that Steve had known back in the forties. 

The missions helped, however. They were a new structure to follow and a project for his mind and body to latch onto instead of dwelling on the past which was so recent yet almost a century ago. He trained with various agents, learning new skills he’d never had the time or necessity to learn in WWII. Part of it was the technology aspect, which was actually quite fun sometimes, but then there were all the new methods of war that were startling in their detachment. So much death was accomplished from behind a computer screen. The first time he’d learned about the drones they used to drop bombs in the desert, he’d gone home shaking, his mind blank except for the bitter, metallic tang of blood sharp in his nose and his eyes watering from smoke that was no longer there.

Stark’s tower, which he’d renamed Avengers Tower, was completed in record time and Steve moved in a few days after Natasha and Bruce had apparently already set themselves up. Natasha came down as he unpacked his meager belongings and lounged on the countertop like a cat, watching him languidly while sipping on a smoothie. Occasionally she would throw out some comment about the decor or ask a question, but mostly they just enjoyed a comfortable silence. He’d grown used to her after a month of working with SHIELD and had even gone on a mission with her in Paris, which was another city whose modern appearance layered uncomfortably over his memories of it. She wasn’t a talkative person, but she was observant and sharp witted and was actually really dorkily funny when she let her guard down a bit. He got the feeling that she was healing from something, or trying to, but he never pried and she never volunteered to share.

Still, despite his best efforts, he was numb. He contributed in strategy meetings, trained with SHIELD agents, and sparred with Natasha. He even agreed to movie nights with her and Clint, and sometimes they would all pile onto his couch and eat popcorn while other times they’d meet at Clint’s apartment and Steve would get a lapful of golden haired dog to pet while they watched whatever film the two of them thought Steve needed to see for his ‘cultural education’. But even with his eidetic memory, he wouldn’t have been able to recall a single complete conversation he’d had in the past two months since the Incident. He ghosted through the days, only really coming alive while he fought. 

He didn’t fight quite the same as he used to in the war, or even the way he had in the back alleys of Brooklyn, all bravado and split lip anger. He still threw himself out at the front of the charge, still took risks that would make Bucky complain about getting grey hairs, but he was quieter about it than he’d ever been. Smoother, faster. More efficient. There was no fire raging inside of him, driving him on and on through battle; there was only the ice that lingered and taught him to slow down, be patient. He’d learned more of how to watch and observe from Natasha and Clint, saw how they had a tendency to sit back and wait until they had all the information they could get their hands on before they acted. He’d always preferred launching himself bodily at the problem and letting whoever emerged, bloody and victorious, decide the next steps. Now he was the one devising plans to sneak in under the cover of darkness, wipe out the enemy before they realized he was there. No explosions at the front door, no rappelling in through the windows. Quiet. Efficient.

Occasionally, unexpectedly, it was Tony who got him out of his head a little and into the moment. Tony was too brash and ostentatious to ignore while sharing the same space and he seemed to have developed the art of saying a thousand words without saying anything at all. Steve had learned to find it oddly comforting. In very, very small doses.

“Yo, All-American Dream, I noticed at our last little get together that you nursed your two little beers and went home sober as a priest. Which made me remember about your super metabolism and how much that must suck. I, being the benevolent genius that I am, decided to experiment. Here. Try this and let me know if it works.”

Steve turned his attention from where he’d been trying to figure out if the metal contraption in the corner was a piece of modern art or an unfinished tech project and hesitantly accepted the glass Erlenmeyer flask from the robot approaching him. He stared at the slightly glowing blue liquid and then raised his eyebrows at Tony incredulously. He expected him to _drink_ this?

“Oh, don’t be a wimp,” Tony complained. “It’s just a little recipe I whipped up to get you nice and drunk. Would it help if I drank with you? Here, I’ll start.”

Before Steve could stop him, Tony grabbed a bottle of whiskey from somewhere under his desk and took a long sip. He set it down with a soft clunk and a gasp before turning to Steve challengingly. Steve looked at the blue liquid again and shrugged to himself after only one more short moment of hesitation. He’d survived everything that’d been thrown at him so far; he doubted that this would be the thing to do him in. He brought the glass to his lips and tipped it back, downing the whole thing in one go.

“Damn, Cap. I didn’t expect you to go all frat boy on it.” Tony paused when all Steve did was stare at him and set the empty glass down on a table. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.” He shrugged. He didn’t really feel any different. He opened his mouth to say so when all of a sudden, it hit. “Oh. Nevermind.”

Tony’s face was concerned. “Good ‘oh’ or bad ‘oh’?”

Steve grinned at him, slow and relaxed. “Good ‘oh’. Real good. Damn. Do you have more?”

Tony laughed, his concern melting into relieved delight. “Slow down there, Don Draper. It’s not quite as easy to make as I made it sound. That was all I had. For now.”

“Okay,” Steve said agreeably. He felt nice. It didn’t feel like normal drunkenness, but then again, he couldn’t even remember the last time he was drunk. He felt light and floaty, a little fuzzy around the edges, like someone had taken all the sharp parts of him and shrouded them in a soft mist. He laughed.

“Oh, you’re a giggly drunk. That’s awesome.”

Steve shook his head. He didn’t remember all the details about the times he’d drunk with Bucky before the war, but he didn’t remember a lot of giggling. He tilted his head a little, thinking. Maybe some giggling. He looked around and spotted a chair to his left and threw himself into it, his limbs feeling loose and not very controlled. The chair had wheels, which he hadn’t realized, and he ended up rolling a couple feet before coming to a stop. He laughed again and sprawled in the chair until his head was leaned all the way back to stare up at the ceiling.

“Wanna hear a joke?” he asked. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the words were coming out a little slurred. He rolled his head to the side until he could see where Tony had sat in his own rolling chair and was drinking again from his bottle of whiskey.

“I would love to hear whatever joke Captain America finds funny,” Tony said with a sincerity that made Steve frown.

“I don’t think it’s one Captain America would like,” he confided. “But I’m gonna tell you anyway.”

“Okay. Color me intrigued.”

“Little Audrey and her mamma were riding in the car, when all of a sudden there came a jolt and the mother cried: ‘Heavens! We have run over a poor man!’” Steve snickered a little to himself, already thinking about the punchline. “But Audrey just laughed and laughed. She had looked closely at the victim’s watch—a handsome timepiece with diamonds, which had landed in her lap after being knocked from his pocket—and knew of course that he was not poverty stricken.”

“Oh my god.”

“Get it? Poverty _stricken_? Because they hit him?” Steve was laughing helplessly in his chair, his belly full of champagne bubble lightness.

“That’s...that’s so much darker than anything I expected from you, I’ll be honest.”

Steve sobered a bit. “Tony,” he said seriously, “I grew up poor, chronically ill, in a rough part of town during the depression. I was raised by a single, immigrant mother. I’m not some caricature of false American values like they’ve made me out to be. There’s a reason my generation was known for nihilism and absurdist art.” He didn’t specify who _they_ were, but he didn’t think he had to. Tony was a smart guy.

Tony seemed to chew on that for a few minutes. He was still taking steady sips from his whiskey bottle. “You know, I knew all of that, but I still grew up on stories about the great Captain America. It’s hard sometimes to separate that image from who you really are.”

Steve nodded, accepting this. “‘S okay. I’m used to it now.”

Tony frowned but didn’t say anything else, just took another long sip of his drink before asking, “You got any more jokes about Audrey the sociopath?”

Steve grinned and launched into a series of jokes that he remembered from his teenage years. They were more popular than knock-knock jokes when he was growing up, so he had quite a few of them to go through. Eventually though, he ran out and their laughter faded, leaving a comfortable silence. Steve thought that Tony was only capable of not talking when he was working or drunk, which probably said something about his character. Steve decided it didn’t matter though, since he currently felt the most at ease he’d felt since...well, honestly, probably since before Bucky shipped out for basic training.

“You are a good friend, Tony,” he said sincerely.

“Friends help friends get drunk,” Tony agreed easily. 

Steve hummed an agreement, but that wasn’t quite what he meant. Or, it wasn’t _all_ he was trying to say. “I meant, you help me a lot. I’m not sure if you realize you do it all the time. I get...stuck. You...help me get unstuck.”

“Oh no,” Tony complained quickly, taking another deep drink of whiskey. “We’re already at the overly truthful, emotional stage. I should have thought this through.”

Steve sighed, but didn’t say anything else for a long minute, just enjoying the fact that his muscles weren’t currently tense and he had no obligations for at least the next twelve hours. Inevitably though, his mind began to stray toward places he tried his best to avoid. It was harder, though, when he was this relaxed and he had nothing pressing to distract himself with.

“They never found him, you know,” he blurted. His voice seemed overly loud in the quiet lab. His limbs still felt like gelatin hanging over the edges of the chair.

“What?” Tony slurred. He’d made some decent headway on that bottle.

“Buck. They never found him. He’s been alone this whole time. It’s always been...it was always…” His throat closed with the strength of his grief and he had to wait it out until he could speak again. “Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky. And in the end, I let him fall and left him down there alone. What kind of friend does that make me?”

Tony was silent for a long time. “I think I’m gonna alter the recipe next time. Lower the potency.”

Steve nodded and swallowed past the lump in his throat that hadn’t yet gone away. “Yeah. Probably a good idea,” he agreed. “I think...I think I should go t’bed. Thank you, Tony.”

He stood up and weaved a little on his way to the elevator. He barely noticed that Tony actually used his name for once as he called out good night as the elevator doors were shutting. On his floor, Steve dragged himself out and forced himself to go all the way down the hall to his room rather than crash on the couch as was so tempting. That night, he dreamed of wind howling in his ears so loudly that it wiped away all other sound except for one, piercing, familiar scream.

He lost track of time for a while. It didn’t really seem important. If a man could lose seventy years, what was a few weeks, six months, a year? He went on more missions, said some things on Twitter that he probably shouldn’t have, but he was past the point of holding his tongue for the sake of faked propriety. SHIELD sent him to DC for a while after that, ostensibly to be closer to the headquarters near the nation’s capital while really providing them an excuse to keep a closer eye on him. Tony had frowned deeply when Steve told him the news, claiming that it was ‘bullshit’ for SHIELD to put Steve in time out just for breaking character and being himself, but waved him off with well wishes and made Steve promise to call every once in a while. A tiny bottle of glowing blue alcohol was tucked into his bag when he arrived at his new apartment and he smiled at it a little before sending Tony a quick text that was just a smiley face followed by a beer emoji and a little heart that he knew would make Tony complain while secretly being pleased about the tiny show of affection.

Steve spent the first few days in DC just trying to get his bearings again. He’d gotten used to the tower with all the Avengers dropping in randomly, bringing food or gossip or a suggestion for a new book or movie he needed to put on his list. It was never quiet there, between Tony’s experiments, Clint and Natasha’s good natured bickering, or even having JARVIS to ask random questions. Here, his apartment felt too much like the first one SHIELD had given him: bland, impersonal, silent. He hadn’t been prepared for all the little things he would miss, like the little corner bodega with Mr. Abdallah who was always grouchy in the mornings but always made sure to have Steve’s favorite brand of chocolate stocked for when he came in on Fridays. DC had a different attitude, different streets to get used to. He felt like the old man Tony always made fun of him for being in that he was just tired of forcing himself to adapt. Maybe he was just tired.

“You need to put yourself out there,” Natasha told him over the phone. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a distant explosion in the background. “Hiding yourself away isn’t going to make it all disappear. You’ve been here two years and I’ve never seen you interact with anyone outside the team.”

He hated her penchant for dropping blunt, accurate truths. “That’s easier said than done, Nat,” he sighed, but didn’t argue. 

Sam was the first person he attempted to flirt with since going into the ice. Of course, his version of flirting was being a total asshole and what might count as a little stalking in order to figure out the guy’s route, but he might as well know what he was getting into if he decided to talk to Steve at all. He was laughing and yelling insults every time Steve ran by, though, which made Steve laugh in return and that felt pretty good. It reminded him a little of being with the Commandos, listening to them rib him about being ‘special’ while still treating him like a normal person. Then Natasha had shown up and suddenly Steve was in his uniform, 12,000 feet above a churning ocean, and he heard his own mouth say something about a barbershop quartet. He was starting to get a little tired of this losing time thing.

He jumped. He didn’t have a parachute, but he didn’t really care. He knew his body could handle the impact, even if the water would feel like concrete hitting it from this height. He straightened out his body to pencil straightness and pierced the waves like a harpoon, sinking fast into the inky depths. It was freezing. His body moved rapidly beneath the water, falling so deep, impossibly deep, into the ocean and he felt the first lick of panic over his bones. He was going to drown again. His lungs seized and spasmed, his muscles twitching. He was so far beneath the ship he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see anything. He was blind and freezing and drowning. He lifted his arms and surged upward, kicking fiercely until his fingers brushed the thick, icy metal chains of the anchor and he was able to haul himself to the surface. He gasped air into his lungs and felt displaced. He was three Steves at once: he was nineteen and angry, choking on pneumonia and hating his weak body for not doing what it was supposed to; he was twenty-six and giving up the fight, finally, hoping to be with the only one who shouldn’t have died in this war; he was twenty-eight and ninety-eight and clinging to the side of a ship full of hostages, a living ghost with a mission. He climbed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony is a good bro, just don't tell anyone.

> Heavy-hearted and I feel so cold
> 
> The nights are longer than I've ever known
> 
> Wherever you are, come and get me now
> 
> When we started, it was long ago
> 
> It was perfect and well, yeah it was perfect
> 
> Wherever you are, come and get me now
> 
> _America - XYLØ_

“Sir?”

“Little busy here, JARVIS,” Tony replied distractedly. He was currently trying to fix the little feedback problem with his newest repulsion tech and the soldering was very delicate work.

“Sorry to interrupt, then, sir, but I believe I’ve found what you were looking for in the Alps.”

Tony abruptly turned off the soldering iron and set it down on the bench. “Are you sure?”

“I’m afraid I cannot be completely sure, sir, due to the nature of the situation, however I would say with eighty-seven percent probability that it is indeed Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes’ body that has been discovered.”

“Well, what are we waiting for then? Let’s go!” Tony jumped up and donned his most recently perfected suit. “Call the team I requested. Don’t call Cap yet until we’re one hundred percent on this.”

“Right away, sir,” JARVIS replied, which really meant that he’d already begun the calls to the various right people. Most of them were ones who would give him access to that area and would have the necessary equipment to safely retrieve Barnes’ body, but on a whim, or perhaps a hunch, he’d also requested that a couple doctors and scientists be on standby. Two of them he’d vetted himself and was technically poaching - temporarily - from Agent Coulson. Who wasn’t dead. Seemed to be a lot of that going around.

The flight to the mountains in question took considerably less time than it would to fly, even in his private jet. Still, he enjoyed the freedom of being in the clouds, letting himself twist and float through the misty white future-rain that looked so much like cotton from the ground. It was nice to be up here with a positive mission rather than a violent one.

He hoped he was right. He hadn’t dared let himself think beyond simply finding Barnes’ body for the Captain, since it seemed like a nice thing to do, especially after that little drinking session that veered into dangerously emotional territory, but then he’d delved into the army records, specifically the interrogations the SSR conducted with Dr. Zola. It had never been confirmed prior to Sergeant Barnes’ fall off the train, but Zola all but bragged about the knock-off super serum that he’d pumped into Barnes’ veins at Azzano. As he read over the transcripts, a little part of his brain began to wonder. Not that he’d voiced any of these thoughts to anyone else, of course.

JARVIS alerted him to the fact that he’d reached his coordinates and he fell into a controlled descent to land in front of the already assembled team in a cloud of swirling snow. It was a desolate, dreary location. He couldn’t feel the cold inside the suit, but he shivered anyway before focusing on the attentive faces in front of him. He was impressed that they’d gathered so quickly, but then again every single person he’d contacted about this mission had more than readily agreed to the task. Bucky Barnes was just as famous as Captain America and everyone wanted to see the war hero brought home.

“Alright, team!” he announced eagerly, the helmet amplifying his words so that he didn’t actually have to yell. “Let’s find ourselves another frozen supersoldier!”

The area erupted in activity and Tony stepped back, getting as far out of the way as possible, and let these very capable people handle the dig. JARVIS’ scans had been inconclusive taken individually, however the compilation of various data had shown that if Sergeant Barnes was _anywhere_ , it would be here.

He alternated between pacing on an icy rock cropping and hovering back and forth as he watched the team, which had split into groups of three, do their thing. If you had told him at eighteen that there would come a day that he would not only be friends with Captain America, but would actively go out of his way to search a rocky, tundra-esque section of windy mountain for the guy’s dead best friend well...Tony’s not even sure he would have bothered laughing at the absurdity of the notion. After all the time his dad had spent _obsessing_ over Captain America, searching for him in the arctic, telling Tony stories about the great war hero who was larger than life, the last thing Tony ever wanted to do was start a search of his own for another soldier from WWII who was long gone. Yet, just as he’d been completely prepared to hate Cap from the moment he met him - and had, for those first contentious hours, with all of the guy’s seeming righteous arrogance - things did not work out the way he’d planned. It turns out that it’s pretty hard to hate someone who fought with you and stood over your body hoping you weren’t dead.

And then he’d built the team their own apartments in his tower and he’d gotten to know _Steve_ rather than Captain America. He sometimes got the feeling that perhaps even his father hadn’t had that and he wasn’t too proud to admit that that sent a vindictive wave of pleasure through him whenever he thought about it. The problem was just how damn _sad_ the guy was. It was like having an ASPCA commercial playing at all hours around the tower and he was getting sick of it. Someone needed to do something.

“Found something!”

Tony flew over immediately toward the source of the shout and hovered anxiously as the team carefully freed their find from the frozen ground. It was an arm. Just the arm. Tony’s heart sank.

“Wait! Over here!” someone else called, several yards to Tony’s left.

He drifted over with less enthusiasm than the first time. He hadn’t thought he’d given himself over to the hope, but seeing Barnes’ detached arm...he realized how much he’d wanted to give Steve not just his best friend’s body, but _his best friend_. He had a feeling that was the only thing that would truly put an end to the Sarah McLachlan soundtrack.

“It’s him!”

Tony moved a little faster and hovered higher so that he could see. There was a face, a body. Intact except for the one missing arm. Hope sparked lightly in his chest again.

“Get him out!” he called. “Leave a layer of ice around him for transport. Bring him directly back to the Avengers Tower.”

The team immediately complied, carefully carving the soldier from the built up ice and snow and placing him in a containment unit Tony had built for this exact purpose. It seemed like forever and no time at all before they were loading him onto the quinjet, flown by Rhodey, and hustling him back to New York. It would be the first time Barnes had been home since he’d been drafted, Tony thought, a little hysterically. 

On the way back he called his borrowed scientists. He’d been informed that they were, in fact, two separate people but they operated as one and came as a package deal. They even responded to a singular name: Fitzsimmons. 

“Oh, hello, Mr. Stark!” greeted an eager Scottish accent. “Was the search successful?” continued a female, British voice.

“We’ve got him,” Tony confirmed. He heard synchronous cheers from the other line. “Be ready. We’ll be there in thirty.”

“Mr. Stark, do you think,” the British one said quickly before he could disconnect the call, “that he could still be...you know, alive? I mean, Captain America survived and I know that -”

“That’s what you’re there to determine, Fitzsimmons,” Tony interrupted. He hung up before either of them could say anything else.

Despite what seemed to be all evidence to the contrary, Tony does know how to be discrete. He’d had every member of this little rescue mission thoroughly background checked and vetted before making contact and each of them had had to sign an NDA forbidding them from speaking of it to anyone outside of the team. The quinjet was flown to Tony’s private airstrip and Barnes was moved to a nondescript van for the rest of the journey to the tower. Both he and JARVIS were monitoring to make sure none of their activities were being recorded or watched in any way. Still, he was surprised at how smooth the whole operation went and soon enough Barnes was laying on a table in one of his private labs, dripping water onto the floor and looking eerily similar to Cap when he’d been dragged out of the arctic.

“Fitz, if you would,” the British woman said quietly, not taking her eyes off Barnes.

Fitz, who was apparently the Scottish half of their equation, had been likewise immobile, staring at the frozen man in front of him. “Right! Yes. Yes, of course.”

He turned and grabbed a tablet, tapping in a few commands before a small army of flying robots began to swarm Barnes’ body, scanning him from all angles. Tony examined the robots with interest, wishing he could grab one out of the air and dissect it. He also found himself wishing that he could steal Fitz permanently, if he was capable of making things like this.

The two scientists began bickering back and forth about various readings and their meanings, but Tony tuned them out. He wasn’t interested in their process, just their results. Finally he saw Fitz tap a few more commands into his tablet and the robot swarm launched again, this time emitting a soft red glow that slowly melted the ice around Barnes.

“Is he alive?” Tony asked. His voice was sharper than he intended and he saw Simmons bite her lip nervously as she looked down at her own tablet.

“I believe so. It’s a bit like being in cryostasis, or at least, how we have theorized cryostasis to be. No one that we know of has yet perfected this technology and the closest real data we have is of Captain Steve Rogers. That being said, Fitz’ little robots -”

“They’re called DWARFs -”

“- have been able to detect very slight signs of life. Extremely slow heartbeat, basic neural activity, that kind of thing.”

Tony nodded. “Let me know when you have more.” He left the room to the sound of Fitzsimmons’ continued banter and wearily made his way back to his own lab. He shed his suit carelessly, knowing that the design would pull all the disparate parts back together, and then headed over to the table on the back wall for the bottle of whiskey that was sitting there. It was still three quarters full. He poured himself a glass and called Pepper.

“You need to tell him,” Pepper said calmly, once he’d finished speaking. She was right, of course. If he were in Cap’s shoes and Rhodey...yeah, he’d want to know right away.

“Yeah,” he sighed. He took another sip of his whiskey.

“I’ll be home tomorrow. Are you gonna be alright?”

“‘Course, Pep. I’m always alright.” He could _hear_ her facial expression over the phone. “Really, Pepper, I’m okay. I’ll see if I can get in touch with -” his tongue stumbled, caught on the instinct to say ‘Capsicle’, which for some reason no longer seemed like a palatable nickname, “with Rogers. See you tomorrow.”

“Alright. Love you.”

“Love you too, Pep.” He hung up and let his head drop over the back of his chair. Then he dialed Rogers. As he expected, he received no response, but the good captain was always on a mission these days. Tony had seen some of the footage. Even after watching some old films of the war featuring a dirty Captain Rogers in a torn uniform and a gun slung over his shoulder, and even after seeing him take down hordes of aliens with a kind of ruthlessness he hadn’t had the time to admire, it had still shocked him to see _Captain America_ clearing out an entire base nearly by himself. There’d been no enemy survivors that mission, the report read.

He tried calling Widow instead. She was an excellent multitasker and he’d been on the phone with her a couple of times without even realizing she was in the middle of an op until he’d heard gunshots. He was gratified to hear her answer with her typical cocky, sultry, “ _Hello_.”

“Hey, little spider. Need to talk to Cap. He around?”

There was a slight pause and then, “He’s indisposed at the moment. May I take a message?”

Tony frowned. “Tell him he needs to get back here right away. I have a surprise for him. It’s a bit of a private thing, so if you could keep this on the DL, I’d appreciate it.”

“Secrets are my specialty,” she said, a smile in her voice. “Oops, gotta go. Talk soon.”

Mission accomplished then. Mostly. He would have to trust that Widow would actually deliver his message to Cap and convey the urgency that he hadn’t quite put into words, but somehow he did trust her for that. She didn’t seem to care about a lot of people, except for Barton, but it seemed like Cap was slowly making his way onto her list of ‘do not murder in their sleep’, so, you know, good for him.

He kept drinking for a while, before eventually passing out right in his chair, his phone blinking with unread messages.


	4. Chapter 4

> Sometimes I can't help blaming you
> 
> For leaving me here, what am I supposed to do? ...
> 
> 'Cause I see you in the daytime, and I hear you at night
> 
> There's a pale imitation burnt in my eyes
> 
> I don't wanna be here, I don't know what to do
> 
> Sometimes I'd rather be dead
> 
> At least then I'm with you
> 
> _Amen - Amber Run_

  
  


“Well, this is awkward.” Natasha’s smirk was confident, calculated. It grated on his nerves like sandpaper. He felt his anger spark like a singular match lit on a cold night in a nameless forest. 

“What are you doing?” His voice was tight, as controlled as he was currently capable of with the dizzying rush of heat in his frozen veins. This moment, unlike the entire fight leading up to it, was crystal clear, a picture taken in HD. He could see the individual fibers that wove together the close-knit, high-tech fabric of Natasha’s suit. Her hair was a vivid splash of red against the shades of black, grey, and beige. He took a deep breath through his nose and tried to think past the shock of someone he trusted to have his back operating against mission parameters, leaving the rest of them to fight alone. If any of the Howling Commandos ever pulled a stunt like this he would have lit into them like a Christmas tree. This was Natasha though, and she wasn’t his soldier to command, nor did he always understand the way she operated. He let out the breath and braced himself for her explanation.

“Backing up the hard drive. It's a good habit to get into.

Steve shook his head. That was all she was going to say? “Rumlow needed your help. What the hell are you doing here?” He looked at the screen and felt something twist in his gut. He hated that ‘gut feelings’ were sometimes so literal. “You're saving SHIELD Intel.”

“Whatever I can get my hands on,” she agreed lightly. Too flippant.

“Our mission is to rescue hostages.” He was starting to feel hollow again, the blazing rage turned to ash like flash paper, but his voice still sounded angry. The dissonance was almost jarring.

“No,” Natasha countered. “That's your mission.” She pulled the flashdrive out of the computer and continued, “And you've done it beautifully.”

“You just jeopardized this whole operation.”

“I think that's overstating things.”

A sudden noise caught Steve’s attention and he looked up to see Batroc throwing a grenade, a distraction to keep them from chasing him as he fled in the opposite direction. Steve moved on instinct and used his shield to deflect the bomb, grabbing Natasha and hurling both her and himself through the window behind them before it could explode. Still, the noise and shrapnel are disorienting and he feels that horrible, layered time again. So many grenades. So much broken glass. He blinked and Natasha’s face came back into focus, streaked with soot and blood.

“Okay. That one's on me.”

Steve scowled at her. “You're damn right.”

Steve was still caught in the middle of anger and numbness when he marched into Fury’s office and began to yell. It felt good, in a savage kind of way, to have something to be angry about, to focus his attention on. He doesn’t remember all that was said, but that feeling of righteousness is familiar. SHIELD was keeping secrets, jeopardizing missions for those secrets, and there was something deeply, inherently wrong with that. Then he saw the helicarriers. The vague, buzzing feeling of _wrongwrongwrong_ in his gut solidified into something like horror as he looked at them.

“We're gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen.”

Steve gaped. His plummeting stomach was worse than stepping out of that airplane. “I thought the punishment usually came after the crime.” He stared at the monstrosities queasily. He wondered if Stark had even known what he’d been fixing when SHIELD had slid the turbine designs under his nose. Stark was the type to get tunnel vision and see only the project in front of him, but Steve had seen the press conference where he’d announced he would never make weapons ever again - except for himself. And Steve knew how distrustful Stark was in general of government agencies. Steve had thought he was more than a little paranoid. Now, as his blood warmed in his veins with fiery rage, he thought Stark hadn’t been paranoid enough.

“SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. It's getting damn near past time for you to get with that program, Cap,” Fury said sternly. He sounded like a parent or a teacher scolding a child.

Steve’s back stiffened. He was more than sick of people assuming that he was the persona that had been constructed for him, tired of people assuming that he was incapable of understanding these “new-fangled modern times.” If anyone understood the depths of depravity human beings were capable of, it was him. That didn’t make this type of control through fear and intimidation _right_. In fact, it made them just as bad as the ones he fought so hard against seventy years ago.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

“Sir!”

Tony startled awake, nearly toppling out of his chair. Why was he in his chair? Had he been working on something? Oh. No. He’d been drinking. He groaned and rubbed a hand over his face.

“What is it, JARVIS?” he mumbled.

“The scientists Fitz and Simmons have succeeded in determining that Sergeant Barnes is, in fact, alive. They are working now to revive him in a similar manner to how Captain Rogers was awakened.”

 _That_ got Tony sitting up. “What! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I tried, sir,” JARVIS said, dryly. “You were deeply unconscious, likely due to the copious amount of alcohol you consumed last night.”

“Yes, thank you, sassy pants. Tell the wonder twins I’ll be there in a few minutes to check on their progress.”

“Of course, sir. May I suggest a shower before this meeting?”

“You’re a real pain in my ass, you know that, JARVIS?”

“Thank you, sir.”

Tony shook his head in reluctant fondness but took his AI’s advice and hobbled the few feet to the full stocked bathroom attached to the lab that he’d had installed for exactly this sort of purpose. His head was pounding dully and he felt like his senses were simultaneously muted and extra sensitive. The hot water helped though, the delicious pressure helping to loosen some of the tweaked muscles from sleeping in his chair (again) while also helping him be more awake. Once showered and dressed in clean, casual clothes that didn’t smell like a distillery, he went down to the lab where he’d set up Fitzsimmons and their project.

“No, I’m telling you, according to the DWARFs we should be able to wake him up _exactly_ the same way they did for Captain America.”

“That’s ridiculous! It’s too dangerous! He doesn’t have the serum like Captain Rogers does and moving too quickly could cause extreme distress to his cardiovascular and nervous system. We need to -”

“Actually,” Tony interrupted, waltzing in, “he does have the serum.”

“What?” Fitzsimmons said, simultaneously.

“I was waiting to see if the two of you would confirm my theory. Snow White here seems to agree with me. If you recall from your history books, Barnes was captured at Azzano and experimented on by HYDRA. I believe that’s how he was able to survive this long.”

Fitz shot a triumphant look at Simmons, who just looked flabbergasted. “I-I should have thought. Of course he would need to be...I mean to have survived the fall and the...yes, it makes sense. I was just afraid that moving too quickly would cause more damage -”

“It’s alright.” Tony waved a hand to keep her from continuing to ramble. “Now you know. Do what you need to do. How long until he wakes up?”

“Well, it took them three days to defrost Captain America, and then another two days for him to wake up on his own. I’m assuming we’re operating on a similar timeline. So, three or four more days after today?”

Tony nodded and started for the exit. “Keep me updated.”

“Will do!” came the simultaneous reply.

In the elevator, Tony called Widow and asked why the hell Rogers hadn’t shown up yet. He wasn’t expecting her sheepish response.

“He was angry at me after the mission. I haven’t gotten to talk to him.”

Tony sighed heavily. He’d really thought he could count on the scary, Russian spy to get Cap to the tower ASAP. He could always try calling again himself, of course, but he felt strangely reluctant. There were so many things that could go wrong in the next three days, maybe it was for the best if Rogers didn’t know yet. False hope would undoubtedly be worse than delaying the good news, right? Maybe he should just wait until Barnes was actually awake and moving under his own power before he called Cap in to sit anxiously by his side and stare at him like Princess Aurora until he woke up. Because that is absolutely what Rogers would do once he was told.

“Alright. Just. When you see him, let him know.”

“Can’t call him yourself?” came the somewhat-teasing reply.

“I’ve decided it’s not urgent yet. I’ll rely on you as a message delivery system for now.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly and hung up.

Deposited once more in his lab, all Tony had left to do was wait.

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

The Smithsonian was a bad idea. He’d been avoiding it the entire time he’d been in DC, yet somehow, a couple weeks before the _Lemurian Star_ , he’d been walking by and his feet had brought him right to the entrance. The good news was that he always wore the same sort of thing while out in public: plain clothes, sunglasses, dark baseball cap. It wasn’t a Russian spy-level disguise by any means, but it allowed him to walk around the city in peace. No one bothered him as he moved through the exhibit, staring at these carefully preserved artefacts that had been in daily, grueling use just months ago it felt like. He remembered when Dum Dum got that dent in his canteen, remembered that rip in Frenchy’s coat, the story behind the tiny carved ‘X’ on Monty’s cigarette case. It was strange to see Dugan’s name fully spelled out, something he never allowed anyone to call him, though he was glad to read that apparently Dugan had remained friends with Howard and Peggy, since both of them had given interviews about him later in life. He’d read the debriefs SHIELD had given him after he woke up, so he’d known the basics, but seeing their lives laid out like this, in an organized, detached exhibit, was a completely different experience. It drove home the fact that those almost seventy years under ice weren’t just a terrible nightmare; the war was over, everyone he’d ever known was dead or decades older than him, and he was alone. A man out of time, indeed. His heart hurt the way it did when he was seventeen and he thought he might die of a heart attack before the age of twenty. He kept walking.

“Battle tested, Captain America and his Howling Commandos quickly earned their stripes. Their mission, taking down HYDRA, the Nazi rogue science division,” the narrator said smoothly as the walked along. His feet paused in front of the display of Bucky, his limbs frozen solidly in place.

“Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield. Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country.”

He stared for a long time, drinking in the photos, the brief clips of old film. The ground shifted under his feet as he noticed all the details he’d forgotten. In his memories, the image had gotten hazy, worn thin like a photograph taken out and looked at too many times, and he’d forgotten just how sharp his jaw was, the angle of his cheekbones, the bright, flinty steel of his eyes that could be captured even by sepia toned film. He was all angles during the war, determination and tension, a guardian and stalwart presence at his side. Steve had taken for granted that Bucky would just always be there. He could throw himself at the pack of wolves because the Commandos had his back, but mostly because Bucky would be there picking them off one by one before they could get too close. Steve stared at the screen and wished he could hurl himself into it, back into that moment on that truck bed, their heads bent close as they planned their next mission. It had always just been the next mission, the next HYDRA base to eliminate, the next group of Allied soldiers to rescue. 

He tore his gaze away and finished going through the exhibit, spending a long time in the theatre room that was playing the various interviews with all the Howlies, along with strategic clips of Steve in action. He was glad to know that all the rest of them survived and lived full lives. Especially Peggy, who’d apparently gotten married - to someone Steve had saved at Azzano, in a strange twist of fate. He’d heard that she was sick and, like a coward, had been avoiding visiting her in the hospital as he’d avoided the museum. He decided he would get over himself and go tomorrow. It was the least he owed her, seventy years too late.

That night Steve went home and laid in his bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Sam had been right. It was too soft. At least back in New York, in the too-large apartment he’d designed with Pepper, his mattress was firm and he also had a futon in his art room where he slept a lot of nights when the memories were just too much. Here in DC was just another SHIELD provided apartment with generic...everything and a friendly neighbor that reminded him a little of Peggy. 

Dawn came before he was ready for it and he realized that he hadn’t moved an inch in his sleep, his limbs board-stiff and ice cold from not using any blankets. He forced himself to move and dragged himself over to his dresser. Jogging clothes. Water. Running. Sam joined him after he’d already been out for his allotted hour, so Steve kept going and enjoyed it perhaps a bit too much when Sam started his usual routine of shouting obscenities at him every time Steve passed and cheekily said, “On your left.”

“Not all of us can be freaky, enhanced, super soldier, you know!” Sam called, panting. Steve just laughed back and ran. It was the kind of thing Bucky would say to him, or even Jones or Monty. Plus, it just felt good to have someone openly acknowledge that he wasn’t this perfect, two-dimensional character created by someone else. 

“VA meeting tonight,” Sam said faux-casually when Steve walked over to where he was resting under his usual tree, sweat darkening his sweatshirt. “Six o’clock.”

Steve felt the ice crack, just a little. Spiderweb fractures in one corner. “Okay.”

Sam tried to dim the megawatt smile that threatened to take over his face. “Okay? Alright, cool, man. See you then.”

Steve waved goodbye and began his final jog home. He still didn’t feel ready to actually integrate into this modern society, to live a stolen life he never should have had, but he’d been brave enough to go to that exhibit and his acquiescence had made Sam happy so, really, what was the harm? He showered and dressed, psyching himself up for the next emotional hurdle of the day. He’d never used to shy away from frightening or dangerous things. He wasn’t sure when he’d started. He decided it would be better to get them all over with at once, like dominos falling one after another: museum, hospital, VA. 

The hospital was both terribly familiar and alien at the same time. It still smelled like antiseptic and sickness, and nurses still walked around with their urgent purpose, the same set to their tense shoulders, but everything about it was just a little bit off from his memory. The clipboards were replaced with tablets, the check-in counter filled with a row of gleaming computers, the waiting room flickering with the light of three separate televisions. He blinked at the bright, fluorescent glow of the overhead lights and walked up to the front desk.

A nurse guided him to Peggy’s room and found himself immobile for a long moment before he could sit down at her side. She was so old. Two years ago, before he woke up, she was twenty-three and just hitting her stride. Now she had lived her grand life, accomplished so much, and he had missed all of it.

“You should be proud of yourself, Peggy,” he said. He was impressed at how even his voice was. How dry his eyes. He looked over at the picture of her family. He wondered what her children did with their own lives. Knowing their mother, they were extraordinary.

“Mm. I have lived a life,” she agreed. Her voice was as thin as paper. “My only regret is that you didn't get to live yours.”

“I did,” he argued softly. “I lived a lot longer than I ever expected to. I’m...not supposed to be here, Peggy.”

Her eyes were as sharp as ever as she stared back at him. “You're always so dramatic.” She shook her head and laughed a little. “Look, you saved the world. You’re still here either because it still needs you or because it’s your reward for all you’ve done. Or both.”

“It doesn’t feel like a reward.”

Peggy’s smile was almost exactly the same as it was seventy years ago. “Like I said. Dramatic.”

He gave her a small smile in return. “It’s all so strange.”

“Hey. The world has changed and none of us can go back. All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over.”

His smile grew more genuine. Peggy had always been so incredibly wise. How had he gone the past two years without her in his life? Peggy started to cough and Steve’s brow furrowed in concern. He turned and poured her a glass of water and offered it with a soft whisper of her name. Her eyes had lost their spark and she was staring at the ceiling as though lost in thought.

“Steve?” she asked, sounding incredulous.

He swallowed harshly against the sudden lump in his throat. “Yeah.”

“You're alive! You...you came, you came back.”

“Yeah, Peggy.”

Peggy started to cry, tears leaking down her wrinkled cheeks. “It's been so long. So long.” Her voice was mournful, full of a sorrow that slammed his body right back into the arctic ocean, icy daggers pinning him in place.

“Well, I couldn't leave my best girl. Not when she owes me a dance.”

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

“Where are we on the Barnes situation?” Tony asked. He didn’t look up from his work, but he waited tensely for the answer as he fiddled with the hologram.

“Fitzsimmons believe that Sergeant Barnes’ core temperature will be returned to normal by tomorrow morning,” JARVIS reported. He too had gotten into the habit of referring to the two scientists as one entity. “They are reasonably certain that it will take approximately forty-eight to seventy-two hours after this point for Sergeant Barnes to regain consciousness.”

“Alright, good,” Tony said distractedly. To an outside perspective, it would look like he was distracted by the newest invention he was designing. The goal was to make it neurologically and mechanically symbiotic, which was proving slightly more troublesome than he’d first anticipated. Starting with him spending an entire night learning about neurology. Truthfully, though, he was preoccupied by the question of one Steven Grant Rogers. Tony knew that he didn’t always have the best judgement and that oftentimes his decisions made with the best of intentions blew up in his face, but he couldn’t help but feel that he was right to hold off on telling Rogers until he was _one hundred percent certain_ about Barnes. If he told him first and then was wrong? He wasn’t sure Rogers would recover.

“‘Sup, Tony?”

Tony was not proud to say that he jumped at least a foot at this intrusion. In his defense, the voice in question came from his ceiling and was not expected in the least.

“You couldn’t have warned me, JARVIS?” he called irritably, glaring at Barton.

“Sorry, sir. Mr. Barton requested my compliance in his mischief. I did not see the harm.”

“ _I did not see the harm_ ,” Tony parroted moodily. “What do you want, bird brains?”

“Tasha told me you had a surprise for Cap. I noticed that the lab eight floors down is suddenly off-limits. Wanna share?”

“Of course she told _you_ about the surprise but hasn’t told Mr. American Flag yet.”

“Steve’s still a bit pissed at her.”

“So I heard,” Tony replied, raising his eyebrow in a silent ‘you tell me a secret I might tell you one’.

Barton jumped down from his perch on the ceiling and leaned casually against a bench littered with discarded pieces of armor. “Fury gave her a separate mission on their last op. Didn’t tell Cap. Cap thinks it could have jeopardized the whole thing.”

Tony let out a soft ‘oof’. Yeah, Rogers wasn’t going to get over that one too quickly. “Does he blame Widow more or Fury?” An important question. If he saw Widow as just a soldier following orders, he might forgive her sooner rather than later.

“Fury. I thought he was going to take a swing at him.”

“And no one told me! I would have brought popcorn. I feel betrayed.”

Barton smiled a little and shrugged. Then he just stared at Tony expectantly. It took Tony a second to realize what he was staring at.

“Oh! Right. Quid pro quo. I found Cap’s lover boy.”

“What?” Barton’s hand went to his ear to adjust his hearing aid, likely thinking he’d misheard or misread Tony’s lips.

“You heard me,” Tony assured him. “I found Sergeant Barnes.”

Barton whistled. “Damn. And Cap doesn’t know yet?”

“Well, he would. Except he didn’t pick up my call and the good spider hasn’t delivered my message.” He tried not to sound too bitter or exasperated. He was pretty sure he failed.

“He’ll talk to me,” Barton said confidently. “I’ll accept the baton from Tasha.”

“You see, I was thinking of this as the telephone game, but a relay race is an entirely different metaphor.”

“Bye, Tony.” Barton jumped up on the table and attached himself to the ceiling again before disappearing into the shadows.

“Where are you even going?” Tony shouted. “I have a door, you know!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who needs a timeline:  
> It starts off in 2012, two weeks after the Avengers, or the Battle of New York. I'm not sure what the month was in the movie, but I'm saying mid-May for the Incident, meaning we start off in June.  
> He joins SHIELD officially in July and moves into the Tower just after his first mission, so mid-June.  
> Tony starts looking for Bucky that Christmas, a couple months after the drinking experiment.  
> He moves to DC around July, 2013 and he visits the Smithsonian and Peggy in early September. This is when he first visits the VA as well.  
> Two weeks later, he goes on the mission with Natasha to rescue the hostages of the Lemurian Star. This is also when Tony finds Bucky in the Alps.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting there.

> Take a look in the mirror and what do you see?
> 
> Do you see it clearer, or are you deceived
> 
> In what you believe?
> 
> 'Cause I'm only human after all
> 
> You're only human after all
> 
> _ Human - Rag’n’Bone Man _

“The thing is I think it's getting worse. A cop pulled me over last week, he thought I was drunk. I swerved to miss a plastic bag. I thought it was an IED.”

Steve was sitting in the back, just listening. He hadn’t shown up on time, but had slipped in with a little over thirty minutes left to go. After seeing Peggy, he’d gone down and sat in front of the Potomac and stared out at the water sightlessly for hours, his mind a buzzing hive of nothingness. He hadn’t noticed the passage of time and had been surprised when he finally came back to himself and saw how late it was. So far the stories had hit closer to home than he’d expected. Even these young soldiers, who fought in deserts so different from the mud and forests he knew, he could understand. He’d learned what an IED was and he could understand the automatic survival response to something that, in a different context, was anything but innocuous.

“Some stuff you leave there, other stuff you bring back,” Sam responded in his quiet, reassuring way. “It's our job to figure out how to carry it. Is it gonna be in a big suitcase or in a little man-purse? It's up to you.”

Steve was still thinking about that while the meeting wrapped up and everyone began to file out. Right now he felt like the things he was carrying wouldn’t even fit in a suitcase. He had no idea how to begin folding them down into something smaller.

“Look who it is,” Sam said with a grin, approaching him. “The running man.”

Steve shook his hand. They had been running together semi-regularly for a couple weeks now, but they were still virtually strangers. “Caught the last few minutes. It's pretty intense.”

“Yeah, brother, we all got the same problems. Guilt, regret.”

Steve recognized the note in Sam’s voice. “You lose someone?”

“My wingman, Riley. Flying a night mission. Standard PJ rescue op, nothing we hadn't done a thousand times before, till RPG knocked Riley's dumb ass out of the sky. Nothing I could do. It's like I was up there just to watch.”

_ Bucky! Hang on! Grab my hand! NO! _

“I'm sorry.”

“After that, I had a really hard time finding a reason for being over there, you know?”

_ A plane in freefall. Freezing water coating the inside of his mouth, his nose, his lungs. The darkness. The peace. _

“But you're happy now, back in the world?”

“Hey, the number of people giving me orders is down to about zero. So, hell, yeah. You thinking about getting out?”

“No.” Steve frowned. He couldn’t think about what life would be like without having something to fight. He didn’t think he’d ever lived a life like that. The sight of those partially finished helicarriers flashed in his mind. “I don't know. To be honest, I don't know what I would do with myself if I did.”

“Ultimate fighting?” Sam suggested, and Steve laughed, the sound almost surprising him despite how often he did so around Sam. “It's just a great idea off the top of my head. But seriously, you could do whatever you want to do. What makes you happy?”

Steve paused, caught off guard by the question. Or rather, by his absolute lack of answer to the question. “I don't know,” he answered honestly.

Life continued on the same routine for the next two weeks. Water, run, shower, shake, integrate himself a little bit more into society. So far he’d gone to three more VA meetings and met Sam for coffee twice. Today’s meeting was more intense than usual. Steve was still on edge from his meeting with Fury the day before and he was having a hard time focusing. Sam noticed his distraction and, in the most quintessentially  _ Sam _ way, managed to subtly corner Steve afterward and proceed to gently push until Steve said more than his usual ‘I’m fine.’

“I saw your reaction when Sergeant Williams made a comment about mortality.” They were cleaning up the meeting room, something Steve often found himself doing, and were thankfully the only people left in the building. Sam purposefully left his comment vague and didn’t ask a direct question, leaving it up to Steve as to how he would respond. It was the same way he treated all the vets that came in, which helped prevent Steve’s hackles from rising.

“I guess it means something a little different for me than for most people.”

Sam gave him a little nod but asked, “How so?”

Steve didn’t answer for a minute. He carried the pile of folding chairs in his hand over to the rack and replaced them neatly while he chewed through his thoughts. “I’m still here,” he said eventually. It didn’t feel adequate, so he continued. “I should have died before the age of twenty. It was mostly luck and stubbornness - both mine and Bucky’s - that I even made it to twenty-five to volunteer for Dr. Erskine’s program. Then, I should have died when the plane went down. Hell, I probably should have died over half a dozen times before that with all the crazy stunts I pulled. You know I actually drove my motorcycle over a wall straight into a HYDRA base, alone, for the purpose of being captured?” He shook his head. In all fairness, he really hadn’t been thinking about surviving that mission. All he’d been thinking about was getting revenge for what happened to Bucky.

“You are still here,” Sam agreed, though it sounded like he was saying something different than what Steve was saying. Steve glanced over at him from where he had started sweeping the floor and was struck by the intensity of Sam’s gaze. “The question is, what are you going to do with the chance you’ve been given?”

Steve’s mouth twisted. “A friend of mine told me that the world has changed and there’s nothing we can do about it. ‘All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best that we can do is to start over.’ I just...don’t know how.”

Sam walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s not easy for any of us, man, but you just gotta figure it out one step at a time. Like eating an elephant.”

The analogy was so strange he startled and gave Sam a puzzled look, causing him to grin.

“One bite at a time, Steve. One bite at a time.”

When Steve got back to his borrowed apartment, he could immediately tell something was off. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up the moment he opened the door and he eased inside to grab his shield where it leaned against the hallway wall. He didn’t turn on the light, hoping that whoever was in his place didn’t have night vision goggles on.

“Heya, Steve.” Steve blinked rapidly as the kitchen light was clicked on and threw himself into a defensive position before the voice registered in his head.

“ _ Clint _ ?” He stared at the man leaning against his counter, drinking his coffee. There was a bandage across his nose and several across his fingers. Clint waved at him casually.

“What’s up, man?”

“What’s - you -  _ why _ ?” Steve felt like something in his brain had broken.

“I’m the next runner in the relay. Or the next in line playing telephone?” Clint tilted his head to the side, looking a little like a confused puppy, and Steve just felt more bewildered.

“ _ What _ ?”

“Tony’s been trying to get you to come back to the tower. Apparently he called but you were on a mission so he left a message with Tasha, but now you’re not speaking to her so…”

Steve realized he was still half crouched and holding his shield. He straightened and dropped his arm, shaking his head. “Why wouldn’t he just call again? Or, more importantly, why wouldn’t you just knock on my front door like a normal person?”

Clint’s look was almost pitying. “No one on this team is normal, Steve. But also, there is actually a good reason.” He gestured for Steve to join him in the kitchen rather than stand on the shadowed side of the island, so Steve cautiously walked over to see what Clint was pointing to in the sink.

The basin was filled with destroyed bits of technology floating in water. Wires and broken pieces of plastic bobbed as Steve stared and processed this information. Bugs. SHIELD had been spying on him this whole time. He thought about the secret secondary mission given to the one agent who was not only capable but wouldn’t openly ask questions. He thought about the helicarriers for ‘preventative justice’. He stared at the listening devices (and did that used to be a camera?) with mounting fury.

“Uh, Steve?”

“You sure you found all of them?”

“Yeah, man. Thorough sweep.”

Steve gave him a sharp nod. “Tell Tony he’s going to have to wait. And not to trust SHIELD.” He paused and then looked hard at Clint. Barton had been a part of SHIELD for a long time, but Steve didn’t think he was dirty. Plus, he’d found all the bugs for him, hadn’t he? “Did Natasha know? What she was doing for them?”

“You’ll have to talk to her,” Clint hedged, “but I can tell you that the order came from Fury not SHIELD.”

“What does that mean? Fury, not SHIELD?” The timing could not be more suspicious. The fog in his brain was finally starting to clear as he pulled out all the evidence and examined it. The Lemurian Star. SHIELD’s secrets. The helicarriers. The car chase in downtown New York he’d seen on the news. Fury’s sudden disappearance.

Clint shrugged. “That’s all I know, man. But listen, you really need to go see Tony ASAP. And when you do, remember that he has been trying to get in touch with you.”

Steve frowned. The wording of that seemed ominous. “Can it wait until tomorrow? I have a meeting with Pierce to discuss Fury going off-grid and I plan to use it to get some information.”

Clint frowned. “I did overhear that it would take forty-eight hours,” he admitted.

That  _ what _ was going to take forty-eight hours? Steve couldn’t imagine a surprise that Tony could make that would be so urgent and yet take so long to complete. His brain was too occupied to think about it, in any case. “Alright then. I’ll drive to New York after the meeting.”

“He’ll want to send you the quinjet.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “And you can’t tell me what it is that’s got him acting so strangely?”

“It’s something that’s easier to believe if you see it.”

Steve processed that for a good twenty seconds before forging on. Knowing Tony, it could be any number of things ranging from surprisingly helpful to slightly traumatic. “Okay. Quinjet after my SHIELD meeting.”

Clint gave him a little salute and turned to dive out the window but Steve called out for him to pause, which he did with one foot already on the windowsill. “Has Tony already made a joke about using you as a carrier pigeon?”

“Fuck you, Rogers.”

Steve grinned as Clint threw himself out the window, but the smile faded as his eyes caught on the spy soup in his sink. Aliens aside, he was pretty sure today was the longest day he’d experienced since waking up in that fake room in Times Square.

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

“Ah, Captain. I'm Alexander Pierce.” Pierce’s stare was intense, more like a bird of prey considering its next meal than anything friendly.

“Sir, it's an honor,” Steve lied, shaking his hand.

“The honor is mine, Captain. My father served in the 101st. Come on in.” Pierce said this flippantly, as though military service were a casual fact to be paraded at dinner parties and used to show off one's patriotism. It made Steve’s skin itch. He followed Pierce into his office and politely looked at the photo of him and Fury that Pierce pointed out.

“That photo was taken five years after Nick and I met. When I was at the State Department in Bogota. ELN rebels took the embassy, and security got me out, but the rebels took hostages. Nick was deputy chief for the SHIELD station there. And he comes to me with a plan. He wants to storm the building through the sewers. I said, ‘No, we'll negotiate.’ Turned out the ELN didn't negotiate, so they put out a kill order. They stormed the basement, and what did they find? They find it empty. Nick had ignored my direct order and carried out an unauthorized military operation on foreign soil. He saved the lives of a dozen political officers, including my daughter.”

“So you gave him a promotion.” Steve tried to wade through the reasons why Pierce might tell him this story. In some ways, it reminded him of his own journey to becoming an actual soldier in the war rather than simply a dancing monkey for the government. He wondered if it was to convey Pierce’s loyalty to Fury or a ploy to get Steve to trust him for some reason.

“I've never had any cause to regret it. Captain, do you know where Nick Fury is right now?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t, sir.”

“Were you aware that your apartment was bugged?”

Steve stiffened. “I recently became aware of this, yes.”

“Were you aware that it was Director Fury who bugged it?”

Steve frowned. That had been his ongoing theory until this moment. Now, however, looking into Pierce’s predatory eyes he wondered if he’d had the story backwards. “No, sir.”

Pierce stared at him for a long moment before pulling out a tablet and calling up a video. “I want you to see something.” On the screen, Steve could see Batroc being interrogated.

“Is that live?” Steve asked.

“Yeah, they picked him up last night in a not-so-safe house in Algiers.”

Steve’s brow furrowed. “Are you saying he's somehow involved in...whatever all of this is? Batroc seemed pretty small fish to me.”

“No, it's more complicated than that. Batroc was hired anonymously to attack the Lemurian Star and he was contacted by e-mail and paid by wire transfer. And then the money was run through seventeen fictitious accounts, the last one going to a holding company that was registered to a Jacob Veech.”

“Am I supposed to know who that is?” He was starting to feel his irritation slip free of its reins as he accepted the file Pierce handed to him.

“Not likely. Veech died six years ago. His last address was 14-35 Elmhurst Drive. When I first met Nick his mother lived at 14-37.”

The implication was as obvious as it was ridiculous. “Are you saying Fury hired the pirates? Why?”

“The prevailing theory was that the hijacking was a cover for the acquisition and sale of classified intelligence. The sale went sour and that led to...more recent, unfortunate events.”

Steve shook his head. “If you really knew Nick Fury you'd know that's not true.”

“Why do you think we're talking? See, I took a seat on the Council not because I wanted to but because Nick asked me to, because we were both realists. We knew that despite all the diplomacy and the handshaking and the rhetoric, that to build a really better world sometimes means having to tear the old one down. And that makes enemies. Those people that call you dirty because you got the guts to stick your hands in the mud and try to build something better. And the idea that those people could be happy today, makes me really, really angry.”

It was a good speech. It really was. But Steve’s gut was still twisting and flipping like Clint in one of his more acrobatic moods and for some reason Steve didn’t believe a word he said. 

“I agree with you,” he said, “about sometimes having to rebuild in order to make things right.”

Pierce smiled, a shark’s smile, and said, “I’m glad you see it my way.”

Steve stood up and held out his hand, unable to stay in the room with him for another minute. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Pierce.”

“Likewise, Captain.”

Steve felt Pierce’s eyes on him all the way to the elevator. He stepped inside and let out a small breath of relief as the doors shut. He leaned against the back railing and shut his eyes briefly, opening them at the feel of the elevator car stopping and letting in another passenger: Rumlow, followed by two other STRIKE agents. Steve turned back around and nodded a greeting, which was politely returned. As the elevator kept going, Rumlow made some comment which Steve responded to, but he was more focused on the sweat rolling down one the agent’s neck and the way the other one’s hand kept twitching toward his belt nervously.

The car stopped again and more STRIKE agents stepped on. ‘ _ Here we go _ ,’ thought Steve wearily. By now he’s completely surrounded and it’s more than obvious what’s about to happen. No anger swept away the cold, however, and all he felt was an icy calm.

“Before we get started,” he said lightly, “does anyone want to get out?” All the agents still and he wants to laugh; did they really think he was that stupid? Then one of them turns around and shoves a shock stick into his belly while the rest aim for his arms, trying to strap magnetic cuffs to his wrists. Steve was grabbed around the throat by a large, muscular arm and he shoved backward to slam the guy holding him into the wall. The arm didn’t let go and all his efforts achieved was another shock to the belly and one wrist nearly cuffed to the wall behind him. He fought against the magnetic hold and shoved his arm down, kicking out at a knee at the same time and heard the satisfying crunch of a bone beneath his boot. A sharp upwards fist to his left knocked the man holding the second cuff backward and he heard the device clang against the wall, now one less threat against him.

The next five seconds were a brutal flurry of kicks, punches, and shoves until finally there was no one left hanging on to him. His mistake, however, was not keeping a closer eye on Rumlow. A swift kick to his wrist sent his hand flying back to the metal wall and the cuff stuck fast. He tugged with both arms but it didn’t even budge before Rumlow stepped in with his own shock stick and held it against Steve’s side until his knees buckled and he was only being held upright by that damn cuff. He was saved, ironically, by one of the other agents getting up and attempting to step in, which forced Rumlow to back off a little.

Steve managed to get a fistful of the other agent’s suit jacket and hurled him into the wall. He heard the sound of glass breaking and figured he’d probably just broken the camera. He grabbed the arm of the next guy and shoved his shock stick toward another assailant, then utilized his legs to knock them both out before swinging around and bracing his feet against the wall to shove off as hard as he could. As soon as the cuff gave he flipped neatly backwards onto his feet and all it took was one elbow and two more punches to dispose of the last two guys besides Rumlow.

“Whoa, big guy,” Rumlow said, holding a shock stick in each hand. “I just want you to know, Cap, this ain't personal.” He attacked before he finished the last word and Steve took three more shocks to his side before he managed to fling Rumlow into the ceiling and drop him to the floor unconscious.

“It kind of feels personal,” Steve panted, looking down at the bodies of the men who’d just tried to take him out. He stepped on the edge of his shield and caught the straps as it flipped towards him. He broke the cuff on his wrist savagely. SHIELD was Peggy’s legacy, something she built to go after the remnants of HYDRA. It shouldn’t be...this. He hit the button to open the elevator doors, only to find a hallway full of armed and armored agents waiting for him. He spun and used the sharpened edge of the shield to cut the elevator cables, sending the car into freefall.

When the car’s automatic brakes kicked in, he was dismayed to see that the hallway beyond the pried-open doors was similarly filling with hostile agents. He forced the doors shut again and looked desperately out the glass sides of the elevator. A large, glass roof spread out below him and he had a moment to wonder at the excessive use of  _ glass _ in this century before he took two steps back and launched himself, shield first, out of the side of the car. The fall took longer than he expected. He hit the glass roof first, the shield and his body weight tearing through metal and steel alike to the sound of screams below before his descent continued uninhibited to the hard ground below. He landed in a ball, curled up on his shield, and did his best to straighten himself out so he could stand. Grunts and groans slipped out of his mouth despite his best efforts to stifle them. He could feel that he had some internal damage, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t power through. He pushed himself to his feet and spared a fleeting glimpse at the shocked faces around him before tearing off out of the building toward the street.

He ran for the garage and grabbed his bike, tossing his leg over and starting the engine with one move. He tore out of the garage and flew down the street, evading the obstacles in his path. He could see a quinjet approaching directly in front of him, but before it could get too close a second one appeared on his right.

“Greetings, Captain. May I be of some assistance?”

“JARVIS!” Steve had never been so glad to hear that AI in his life. “I could really use a ride.”

Rather than answer, the quinjet turned around with the ramp lowered to allow Steve to ride directly inside, where he slid to a stop. He could hear a voice from the other jet calling for him to halt, but he just called for JARVIS to get going. A few bullets hit the side of the jet, but didn’t cause any major damage. 

“Good news, Captain. The stealth abilities have been upgraded on this vehicle, which means that once we reach optimal altitude, I will be able to make us disappear from all sensors.”

“That’s good, JARVIS, thank you.”

“You are welcome, sir.”

Steve collapsed wearily onto one of the chairs and closed his eyes.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild Bucky appears

> The self is not so weightless  
> Nor whole and unbroken  
> Remember the pact of our youth
> 
> Where you go  
> I'm going  
> So jump and I'm jumping  
> Since there is no me without you

_Achilles Come Down - Gang of Youths_

“- don’t want to overwhelm -”

“- vitals are strong -”

“- dealing with a situation in -”

“- should be here soon…- said that he passed out -”

Bucky couldn’t make any sense of the words being spoken around him. Most of them sounded like American accents, which didn’t make a lot of sense. He tried to remember what happened. Where was he? He felt...warm. That was strange in and of itself. He hadn’t felt truly warm since he left Brooklyn, less so after Azzano. 

“I think we should bring him straight here.” The voice sounded argumentative, firm, but just as unfamiliar as the other snatches of sound he’d been hearing.

“Normally, I would agree. However Steve’s injuries are more severe than he pretends and if we bring him here he won’t allow us to treat him at all.”

“No one out stubborns the Cap,” a third voice agreed cheerfully, though with an undercurrent of weariness that Bucky deeply understood.

It was obvious that the Steve they were talking about was his Steve, both from the way they called him ‘Cap’ and their general understanding of his stubborn inability to receive basic medical attention. He wondered what the fool had done this time to get himself injured. He blinked and the world was nothing but white light for a minute before it coalesced into a ceiling. He blinked again.

“He’s awake!” someone gasped. This voice was British, female, but definitely not Carter. His brow furrowed. He felt like he was missing something important.

“Don’t crowd him!” someone else shouted, Scottish this time. “It’s gonna be more than enough sensory information without you lot hanging over him.”

He appreciated Scottish guy, even if he’d yelled too loudly and caused Bucky to wince. He hadn’t even fully opened his eyes yet and he was already overwhelmed. The air smelled clean and faintly metallic, so thankfully different from the sweat, mold, and chemicals of Azzano. His ears were starting to pick up on more sounds, something beeping, an electric hum, footsteps. He was pretty sure the footsteps were some of the room’s occupants leaving in response to the Scottish man’s outburst. He blinked again and moved his head sluggishly, trying to look around. 

“Hey, there,” greeted the British lady. She was bright faced and generally unimposing with long, curly blonde hair and a friendly smile. “Are you in any pain right now?”

“No,” he said, though his voice was weak.

“Get him some water please, Fitz, thank you, darling. Oh, no, it’s not wise to try to get up yet, Sergeant Barnes. Give yourself a minute to adjust first, alright?”

Bucky accepted the water from the guy he assumed was Fitz. He was relieved to note that he was able to lift his right arm unimpeded, and he couldn’t feel any restraints like there would be if this was a HYDRA facility. Fitz was only a little bigger than Stevie had been before the serum, perhaps as big as Steve would have been if he’d been fed enough all his life and hadn’t been quite so sick.

“How’s the patient?” another man asked brusquely, coming into view. He had a goatee and wore some of the strangest clothes Bucky had ever seen. He had no idea what agency ACDC was, but their dress code seemed extremely lax. Then again, now that he was looking, everyone in the room was dressed oddly. 

“Vitals are still good, he said he’s not in any pain at the moment so that’s another good sign. How soon can Captain Rogers get here?”

Bucky watched the man with the goatee make a pained face. “Cap is an idiot,” he said bluntly, which made Bucky half want to defend his friend and half want to agree with fervent exasperation. “The internal damage was extensive. I’ve got Bruce looking him over right now.”

He wished he could ask what happened, but his brain still felt a bit muddled and his tongue was too heavy to easily move. He’d managed to sit up a bit with Fitz’s help to drink the water, but he’d had to lay back down immediately once he finished, exhausted beyond belief. Strength felt like a thin trickle flowing into his veins, too slow for comfort.

The British lady straightened up from where she was bent over an odd looking glowing rectangular device. Bucky wished he could see it better to figure out what it was. “I can go take a look at him, if you want,” she offered.

Goatee waved his hand negligently. “The old man’ll be fine. If I send anyone else up there to fuss over him he’ll just play the super soldier card and run back out after those bastards.”

“It sounds like you know him well,” Bucky commented, regaining some mastery over his speech ability. His voice was much stronger now that he’d had some water. 

Goatee grinned at him. “My bad. We should have done introductions first. Never been very good at manners. I’m Tony Stark, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, superhero.” He winked at Bucky. “I’m also the guy who rescued you. Or paid for other people to do it, at least.”

Bucky reeled with the information - who in the world had _a billion dollars?_ \- but found himself stuck on one part of the man’s speech. “Stark?”

“I know, it’s confusing. You and Cap knew my old man, yadda, yadda, yadda. All will be explained in due time.” He made a vague gesture to brush the matter aside. “SHIELD didn’t exactly handle it well when it was the good Captain’s turn for all of this, so we’re trying to be more upfront with you, but you also look a bit like a deer in the headlights so I don’t want to overload your circuits more than I need to.”

“Steve’s turn for what?” Despite Stark’s flippancy, his words sent a thrill of fear up Bucky’s spine. He managed to push himself up against the headboard of the bed he was in (thankfully not a table), ignoring the strange ache in his left side to focus on Stark.

“All in good time,” Stark repeated. “Anyway, those two are Fitzsimmons. I’ve given up trying to tell them apart. They’re the reason why you’re still here, awake, and not a popsicle.”

“And why would I be…” he started, and then drifted off as he suddenly remembered: the train, the blast, falling, darkness. “Was I dead?”

The British woman’s face popped eagerly into view. He guessed she was the Simmons half of Fitzsimmons. “No! You weren’t. It’s incredible actually. Basically, you were in suspended animation due to the extreme temperatures and we were able to revive you once Mr. Stark located you in the Alps.”

Suspended animation, huh. He remembered reading the stories about _The Man Who Awoke_ in the magazine with the vivid covers, _Wonder Stories_ (which he sometimes stole from the corner store when he couldn’t afford it, or else sneakily read the stories in the aisle where Mr. Jenkins couldn’t see him). Norman Winters had frozen for five thousand years at a time though, which he was pretty sure wasn’t the case for him. Or at least, he hoped. “So, where am I now?

“New York City,” Fitz answered. He also had one of those glowing devices, but now Bucky could see numbers and words flashing across it. Fitz was tapping at it rapidly, causing various numbers and symbols to flash across the surface too fast for him to read. He’d never seen tech like that before, but then again it seemed to be improving rapidly all the time and the SSR was always stealing stuff from HYDRA to reappropriate. Plus, if those stories he’d read as a teenager got anything right about suspended animation, five years could have passed and he would have no idea. “Avengers Tower, to be more exact.”

“I’m back home? They discharged me?”

“Oh, well,” Simmons started, looking a bit awkward, “not exactly. I mean, yes, you’re home in New York like Fitz said but the whole discharge thing is a little complicated because -”

“Because you’ve been dead for seventy years,” Stark interrupted bluntly.

Bucky blinked at him stupidly. Seventy years? He’d been hoping for a few months at most, maybe a few years if he were really unlucky. Seventy years would mean...no, that was impossible. He wasn’t Norman fucking Winters. He didn’t live in a sci-fi tale from a corner store magazine. He looked around again and saw the room he was in with new eyes. The bright lights, the glowing screens, the gadgets he couldn’t begin to guess the use of. Was that a robot cleaning the table in the corner? He shook his head in disbelief.

“Yeah, you should have seen Cap,” Stark said. “I wasn’t there, which is a tragedy because the footage that exists is terrible and that was a moment for the history books. But yeah, he was in the same boat.”

“So he...what? He didn’t just…” He didn’t even know how to put into words what he was trying to say. He would have assumed, or at least he had hoped that when they were talking about Steve and then they dropped the bomb on him about time travel - or _suspended animation_ , whatever - that Steve had survived the war and lived to a ripe old age by the grace of science. Now, he wasn’t sure what to think.

“Oh!” Simmons said, clearly picking up on his train of thought, saving him from having to further articulate himself. “No, Steve didn’t...I mean, he was also frozen, like you. We found him almost two years before we found you.”

He felt his heart sink to his toes. _Oh no. Steve, you stupid bastard._ “How,” he croaked. “How was he frozen? He didn’t fall off that train too, did he?”

“No,” Fitz assured him. “He, uh, well. He crashed a plane into the arctic. About two weeks after you d - after you fell.”

How many shocks could a person go through in a limited period of time? Bucky was starting to go numb with it all. He had so many questions, but he couldn’t even begin to piece them together coherently in his mind, let alone voice them.

“Also, Sergeant Barnes, there’s something you should know.” Bucky looked up at Simmons’ wince and braced himself, not knowing how much more he could handle right now. “When you fell, there was significant damage to your left arm. In fact, about three quarters of it was separated from your body at the time of impact. Luckily, the cold helped to slow the blood flow, along with the version of the serum that was keeping you alive. But, uh, you are...missing part of your limb.”

Bucky listened to her explanation with a patience that he didn’t know he possessed before slowly looking down. His left shoulder looked normal enough beneath the thin garment they’d put on him, but beneath the short sleeve his arm continued for only about an inch or two before it just...stopped. He stared. A calm, detached part of his mind noted that he was glad that he’d already received so many world shattering pieces of news before this because he was already numb as he just kept staring in silence at the empty space where his arm used to be.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Stark said, “I’ve started building you a new one.”

Bucky jerked his head up at this casual admission. He had started _building Bucky a new arm_? What did that even mean? Was this a common thing in the future?

Stark shrugged and looked away, as though he couldn’t make eye contact while offering something so sincere and profound. “It’s no big deal. I’m kind of a genius so… Plus I knew it would make Cap sad if you were sad and he’s been a kicked puppy for way too long. I can’t stand looking at him. It’s selfish really.”

Bucky shook his head. While he did know the power of Steve’s hang-dog expressions, it was clear from Stark’s awkward posture that he really was just trying to be nice but was probably just as shit at it as Howard. Worse, probably, since Bucky wasn’t sure Howard ever truly did anything altruistically. “Well. Thank you anyway, selfish or not.”

Stark gave him a sharp nod and then cleared his throat. “Well. I’m gonna go check on Captain Stupid. Maybe yell at him for a minute. You should go up to his floor and take a shower, explore a bit, dip your toes into the twenty-first century. I’ll bring Rogers to you when he’s no longer a danger to himself and others.”

Bucky watched him go, feeling incredibly lost. He felt like he just stepped off a roller coaster without ever having been aware of getting on the ride. After a moment, he pushed himself into a sitting position with his right arm and swung his legs over the side of the bed, determined to do anything other than sit here stewing in the chaotic swirl of thoughts and emotions in his head. He was surprised at how strong he felt, the earlier fatigue and stupor having faded some time during his exchange with Stark Jr. He’d expected weakness, dizziness, fatigue, all the usual symptoms of getting your ass handed to you by a mountain, he suspected. Instead, the only issues he had while getting to his feet was the strange change in his balance from the loss of weight on his left side and the nervous hovering from Fitzsimmons.

“Any way I could get some actual clothes?” he asked. “I can feel a breeze.”

He watched as both the scientists blushed and Fitz rushed to grab him a fluffy-looking robe. “Sorry,” he apologized. “We kinda had to cut off your uniform once we got you out of the ice. I’m sure Mr. Stark has already put clothes for you up in Captain Roger’s apartment. He does that kind of thing. Oh, let me -”

Fitz helped Bucky slip on the robe and then guided him to an elevator and stepped inside, beckoning for Bucky to follow. It felt strange to be walking around without shoes, but he followed him anyway, letting the cool tile assure him of the reality of the moment when everything seemed so much like a bizarre dream. He automatically pulled his right arm to curl around his middle, helping slightly to offset his lack of balance. Still, he staggered a little on his way to the sleek looking elevator and watched in bewilderment as Fitz began talking to the ceiling once the doors closed behind them.

“JARVIS, could you take us to Captain Roger’s floor, please?”

“Of course, Mr. Fitz,” the ceiling answered politely, causing Bucky to jump.

As the car started to move, Bucky whispered, “Who - or what - is that?”

“My name is JARVIS, sir,” the ceiling answered him. “I am an Artificial Intelligence created by Tony Stark. I am present throughout the building, as well as several other buildings, vehicles, and mainframes devised by Mr. Stark. If there’s anything I can assist you with, or anything you wish to know, you need only to ask.”

“Amazing,” Bucky breathed. “Well, uh, it’s nice to meet you, then, JARVIS.” He felt a little silly addressing someone he couldn’t see, let alone a _robot_ , but then JARVIS returned his greeting, sounding pleased, and all Bucky felt was awe. 

That awe only grew once the two of them stepped out into Steve’s ‘apartment’, which easily could have fit at least five of their place back in Brooklyn. The elevator opened up to a small entryway, through which Bucky could see a large living room, kitchen, dining room table, and then a long hallway full of doors leading off into various other rooms. The hardwood floors were a gleaming, rich dark brown that complemented the forest green walls of the living room and the black granite counter tops in the kitchen. The colors made the large space seem comforting and warm rather than intimidating. Shelves made of dark wood and stuffed to the gills with books lined the walls of the living room except where the largest, thinnest television he’d ever seen (at least, Bucky assumed it was a television) sat in front of the invitingly comfortable looking couch. What caught his attention the most, though, was the huge wall of windows overlooking the New York skyline.

They were up so high. He couldn’t believe it. He walked straight up to the window and put his hand against the glass, peering out. He felt like a little kid riding the ferris wheel for the first time, laughing at how small all the people looked down below. Now, the people looked even smaller, like tiny ants scurrying about their lives.

“No flying cars?” he asked, a bit disappointed, watching the ground-bound vehicles move along the congested street. Even from here he could tell that the design was different than what he had known, but not unrecognizable.

“Not exactly,” Fitz said. He hadn’t moved more than two steps into the entryway. “But we do have quinjets, which are pretty cool. That’s mostly just SHIELD though, regular people just use planes. Or helicopters, I guess, sometimes. I can show you some of my own inventions some time once you’ve settled in. And I’m sure Mr. Stark will show you all of his stuff. Oh, and I’ve seen Captain Rogers use tech on missions, so I imagine he knows a bit, though I’ve only met him the once so I don’t really know how familiar he is with...everything.”

“You don’t know Steve?” Bucky turned around, surprised. It was obvious that Stark knew Steve pretty well, but he hadn’t even thought to ask if Fitz and Simmons did too.

“Er, no. I, uh, to be honest, this is my first time in the Tower. Also I…” he hesitated slightly but then continued, “I’ve heard that no one does really. Except, like, three people. I’m definitely not one of those people.”

Bucky frowned. Growing up, Steve had never been particularly close to anyone except him, but he’d still _known_ people and been known in return. He’d practically been a part of Bucky’s family for one, and then there were the nurses at the hospital who grew fond of him from his frequent visits, the nuns down at the church, the old man on the corner who sold ice cream in the summer and oranges in the winter from his cart. Then the war happened and he’d been not just accepted by the Howlies, but loved by them. Bucky couldn’t imagine Steve being here for a whole two years and not finding a group of people like that to support him.

“Huh,” was all he said, turning back to the window.

“Anyway, uh, I was really just supposed to drop you off. If you need anything, just ask JARVIS, okay?”

“Thanks, Fitz.”

Fitz beamed at him in return and got back in the elevator, leaving Bucky alone in the huge, empty space. Did Steve stay here all by himself in this grand place? He started poking around, looking at the titles on the bookshelves, opening cabinets and drawers, sticking his head in the various rooms off the hallway. He kept automatically reaching for things with his left arm and having to stop and take a deep breath with no corresponding hand touched what he was aiming for. It made him vaguely nauseated each time, but he just continued repeating the same mantra in his head: _I’m alive. Steve’s alive. I’m not with HYDRA. I’m in the future. It’s okay._

He was glad to see that Steve had a room that looked like it was dedicated entirely to art. There was a large easel in front of the window with a canvas painted only with an abstract background and dozens more canvases strewn around the room, all turned around so that the paintings on the front couldn’t be seen. Sketchbooks also littered the surfaces of the table and futon, though it looked like Steve spent quite a bit of time sleeping on that futon as well, even though it was obvious that he also had his own bedroom. 

Curiosity got the better of him and since neither of them had ever really cared about personal boundaries when it came to the other, Bucky walked into the room and picked up the first sketchbook he saw. It was filled with portraits of the Commandos, interspersed with scenes from the war. It looked like Steve was trying to record all of his good memories of them, like the time Frenchy had an unfortunate incident involving stinging nettles and spent the next week complaining and cursing in livid French. The next sketchbook looked to be entirely of him. He flipped through the pages, seeing himself at every age. There was a drawing of him at five years old, laughing while Becca, only three at the time, pouted beside him petulantly. Steve had drawn him as a teenager, cocksure and arrogant, as a young man before the war, dancing by himself in their old kitchen as he made dinner out of the meager groceries they’d been able to afford that week, as a sniper, grim and focused and streaked with dirt.

He put the book down and moved onto the paintings. The first grouping was full of people he didn’t recognize. He pulled out the top one and stared at the woman with fiery red hair against a background of jagged black and grey paint strokes. She had a gun in each hand, but a playful smile on her face and Bucky wasn’t sure if it was meant to be reassuring or frightening. The next was of a man bent over a worktable, his face half lit by a blue light, similar to the one that was for some reason shining out of the middle of his chest - a metaphor for his heart? He leaned in a little closer and he could see the shadow of a goatee on the man’s face. Perhaps it was Stark. Several others followed, an archer painted in shades of purple and black like a bruise, a serious looking man in glasses with a strange green shadow, a dark skinned man with a bright smile and shadowy wings under the shade of a tree. Bucky frowned. There was an element to these paintings, something he couldn’t put his finger on, but it unsettled him.

The next set of paintings solidified that feeling. These were more abstract, just colors and slashes used to express a certain emotion or memory, but Bucky thought he could identify them well enough. The one that was entirely mud browns and dark greens with splatters of blood red was one of the countless battlefields they’d seen where the ground was torn up from so many bombs and desperate bodies, the soil too saturated with rainwater to soak up the blood that was spilt. He set that one aside, swallowing heavily, and pulled out another. This one was just shades of grey and black, an abyss on canvas. He remembered the moment when the pain and fear finally cut off sharply and it was like a split second of utter darkness before waking up to the too-bright light of Stark’s medical room. All the rest were like this, even in the other stacks, dark blends of color that conveyed emotions and memories too heavy to carry mixed with a few portraits of people Steve must have met in this century. There were no paintings of before, at least no happy ones, and the lightest color used was white and light blue in a painting that looked like an expanse of ice and snow that made Bucky shiver and set it back hastily.

When he was done perusing, he placed everything back carefully and stepped back into the doorway, looking over the room with new eyes. He’d thought it was such a positive thing to see Steve doing his art, to know that he had the money now to indulge in whatever paints or pencils he wanted to make the things in his head real on paper. Now he just felt at a loss. How much had Steve changed since that moment on the train? Bucky still felt more than a little broken himself; how would he even begin to help Steve heal from...whatever this was? He sighed and shut the art room door firmly, resolving to cross that bridge when he got to it. “No need to borrow tomorrow’s troubles,” his ma’s voice said in his head.

He easily located Steve’s bedroom, despite the fact that there were two others in the apartment. The walls in here were painted a cool blue and the carpet was soft and plush under his feet. Art - not Steve’s own - decorated the walls at carefully spaced intervals. Because he was a nosy bastard, he opened a few of Steve’s drawers and peeked inside. All of his clothes were folded meticulously, even his socks. Bucky raised his eyebrows. Since when did Steve fold his socks? He glanced around the space again and felt that same sense of unease sink into his gut. Everything was perfectly in its place throughout the entire apartment. The books had been organized by subject and then alphabetical by author, his bed was made to military precision, the framed photos on his dresser were spaced out so evenly Bucky had a suspicion that he could pull out a ruler and confirm that they were equidistant from each other. He frowned. Steve had never been like this. Sure he’d never been a slob, but he was forever leaving dishes in the sink and leaving laundry until the last possible minute, let alone folding all of it neatly and putting it away instantly. The only room in the entire apartment that hadn’t been pin neat was the art room, and even that had had some sort of organization system. Bucky didn’t know what to make of it.

He figured he wouldn’t get any answers until he got to speak to the man himself, so he decided to follow Stark’s advice and get cleaned up. Steve’s room had an en suite bathroom, since he was clearly living the high life now, so he stepped inside with the intent to take a nice, hot bath. He stopped after two steps inside and whistled. The bathroom was just as fancy as the rest of the apartment and bigger than their old bedroom before the war. There was a huge clawfoot bathtub, large enough to fit two normal men or one supersoldier, along with a large glass walled shower that seemed more complicated than he thought showers ought to be. The smooth black tiles felt cool under his bare feet and he wriggled his toes as he examined the various nozzles and levers, wondering if airplanes had as many buttons as this thing.

“Uh, JARVIS?” he tried. Fitz had said he could just ask and Bucky didn’t have any other ideas except to just...talk to the ceiling the way he did earlier.

“Yes, Sergeant Barnes. How may I assist you?”

It was somewhat disconcerting that the robot man was in the bathroom with him too, but seeing as it was helpful at the moment, he’d deal with that issue later. “How do I turn this thing on?”

“I can do that for you, if you like. Or I can explain.”

“Explain please.”

Bucky followed JARVIS’ instructions and then set one of the fluffy towels that were stacked on a shelf in the corner within reach of the shower before stripping off the robe and paper-thin garment they’d put on him. The buttons in the back snapped free easily when he gave a good tug, which was very helpful since he wasn’t sure how he would have managed otherwise with just the one hand. The water was heavenly. Hot and perfectly pressurized, he thought he might stay in here until someone came and physically dragged him out of it. He moaned as the water hit his back and sides, coming from the no less than _seven_ shower heads to loosen up his muscles and release most of the tension that had been building up since he’d first awoken in the...did Stark say twenty-first century? Jesus Christ. He tipped his head back to soak his hair and just breathed. How many hours had he been awake? It felt like so much had happened since he’d first blinked his eyes open on that bed that surely it must have been days already, but he also wasn’t sure it had even been three whole hours. 

There was also a part of him, a terrified, shivering, screaming part of him, that was afraid that none of this was real. Perhaps it was all just an illusion or a hallucination as a result of being back on Zola’s table, his arms and legs trapped while they did whatever they wanted to him. He tipped his head back farther and let the water run over his face. The heat and moisture felt real. The ache in what was left of his left arm felt real. The hunger that was just now making itself known in his belly felt real. So what if it was preposterous? Stranger things had happened in his life. Steve used to be a tiny, scrawny, asthmatic guy with anger issues and now he was a larger than life superhero. Weird things happen. He tipped his head down and took a deep breath, letting the water run from his neck down his spine. After a long moment, he opened his eyes to examine the bottles lined up on the shelf, opening them to sniff at the contents before choosing which ones to use. It was easier to just focus on what was right in front of him. He chose the one that smelled like tangerines and found that it was only a little awkward getting used to showering with one hand. There were still several moments where he automatically tried to use his left hand, but overall he was surprised at how quickly he adapted. For now, at least.

Eventually, he got out and rather than ask JARVIS if Fitz had been right about Stark putting clothes for him somewhere, he stole some of Steve’s clothes out of his closet before going back to the kitchen for some food. The clothes were softer than anything he’d ever worn and he’d chosen things that seemed to be made specifically for wearing around the house. It was significantly harder to get dressed with one hand than to shower, he discovered, but the soft, grey cotton pants slipped on with only a small fight, followed by a lengthy struggle to tug on a dark blue undershirt that was perfectly his size, meaning it was definitely too small for Steve. The only reason he didn’t give up on the sock fiasco was that they were actually the most comfortable socks he’d ever worn and he was determined to get them on his damn feet if it killed him. It nearly did, but eventually he stood, fully dressed and panting slightly, and made his way back out into the main living area.

The kitchen wasn’t nearly as well stocked as he’d expected from looking at the rest of the place, but there was enough to throw together a decent meal of pasta and even a salad (Ma would be proud) that he brought to the table in front of the windows and ate while looking down at the tiny ant people and waited for Steve. He was starting to get a bit worried about how long it was taking for Steve to get back, but he also had no idea where to start looking for him if he did leave the apartment. He supposed he could ask JARVIS, but he also wasn’t panicking yet and he was starving. He ate the food in record time and washed his plate before making one up for Steve and setting it in the oven to keep it warm. He sat back down in front of the window and crossed his left ankle over his knee.

No one had even told him the date yet, he realized. “Hey, JARVIS?” he asked. It was better than sitting in silence, lost in his own thoughts. “Tell me about this new future.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt like it would be too clunky to include this in the story itself, but the reason why Bucky doesn't question what an AI is is because he's a complete nerd. I mentioned that he used to read sci-fi magazines growing up and he most definitely read Isaac Asimov's "Runaround" (and others) when it came out in 1942 and spent the entire afternoon talking to Steve about the possibility of sentient robots in the future.


	7. Chapter 7

> Then it's just too much, I cannot get you close enough  
> A hundred arms, a hundred years, you can always find me here  
> And Lord, don't let it break this, let me hold it lightly  
> Give me arms to pray with instead of ones that hold too tightly
> 
> _100 Years - Florence + the Machine_

Steve grumbled at the scrutiny he was receiving from Bruce and the couple of other medical professionals hovering around him. He was _fine_ . Still moving, still breathing, not dying. Hell, at this point he wasn’t even sure if he _could_ die.

“You are _not_ fine, Steve,” Bruce said, more sharply than was normal for the usually laid back doctor. “Those shock sticks were calibrated specifically for you and you have multiple burns which you received even through your suit. Not to mention the cracked ribs, bruised kidneys, ruptured spleen -”

“Alright, alright,” Steve interrupted. “I get it.” Which was why he allowed them to continue to poke and prod at him for the next hour until Tony finally showed up to check in on him.

“Thanks for the save, Stark,” he said, smirking a little. He meant it both for the timely quinjet and for his current presence which had put an end to all of the doctors’ ministrations. 

“Don’t thank me yet,” Tony said, somewhat ominously. He shifted on his feet and Steve narrowed his eyes at him. “I hope this means you’re planning on staying at the tower for a little while until things die down. I appreciate that, by the way,” He said sarcastically. “Now I’m gonna have jacked up goons on my ass about where you are. Goons? God, that sounds like we’re some sort of terrible comic book characters.”

“I am a comic book character,” Steve deadpanned, causing Tony to let out a bark of laughter. He followed Tony out of the medbay and down the hall toward the elevator. “I was planning to stay here for a day or two at least, unless it’s a problem for you. I don’t want to be bringing all this right to your door.”

“Shut up, Rogers. Of course you’re staying here. In fact, you should go up to your apartment, get some rest. You need to be nice and recovered before you go jumping out of any more buildings.

Steve rolled his eyes. “I didn’t exactly have a choice at the time.”

“I thought you were the man with the plan?”

“Fuck off.”

Tony cackled, forever surprised and amused whenever Steve swore in front of him, despite how much Steve had loosened up since the first time they’d gotten drunk together. “You know, I absolutely adore how different you are from the propaganda. I would have hated you otherwise.”

Steve felt himself blush a little at the sincerity. “Yeah well. Captain America wasn’t exactly my idea. I just wanted to fight.”

“I one hundred percent believe that about you, Rogers. Now get your butt upstairs and get some rest. JARVIS will tattle on you if you don’t.”

He all but pushed Steve onto the elevator and hit the button to close the doors behind him, not giving him an option. Steve shook his head as JARVIS took him directly to his floor and waited until Steve stepped out into his entryway before shutting the doors behind him with a stern sounding ‘snick’. He sighed and stepped further into his apartment, dropping his shield wearily against the narrow part of the wall that divided the entryway from the rest of the open space. He kicked off his boots with a pained grunt and turned around before promptly halting after no more than two steps.

There, sitting at his dining room table like the sweetest, most painful ghost Steve had ever seen, looking almost exactly as he had the day Steve had lost him, was Bucky. Steve felt his breath catch in his throat and the room swayed dangerously around him.

“Stevie?”

Even his voice was the same. Steve stepped forward cautiously, terrified to look away. “Is this a dream? Am I...hallucinating or something? They said I didn’t have a concussion or anything.”

“Pretty sure I’m real, Steve.” Bucky stood up and took a step toward him, closing the distance. “Come here.”

Steve finished making his way across the room on feet he could no longer feel. He reached out a shaking hand and his fingertips touched Bucky’s calloused ones. He slid his fingers in between Bucky’s with a swallowed sob and crowded forward until he was pressed chest to knee against Bucky. His hand slid out of Bucky’s fingers to wrap around his waist, pulling him so tightly against him that he was afraid he might be leaving bruises but he couldn’t stop himself. He tucked his head into the crook of Bucky’s neck and shoulder, breathing in the familiar scent of _home_ mixed with the citrus tang of his tangerine body wash. He reached out his other hand and touched his face, his hair, his neck, confirming with his fingertips what his eyes hadn’t quite been able to believe. 

“It’s you,” he breathed. “It’s really you.”

“It’s me.”

Steve pulled back far enough so that their foreheads pressed together and he could just breathe. He grabbed Bucky’s hand again and couldn’t let go. “How?” he whispered.

“Apparently,” Bucky whispered back with a hint of dry humor, “you and me got a knack for freezing ourselves into the future.”

Steve drew back and stared him in the eyes, shock and awe and guilt and joy all warring within him. “I had no idea, Buck. If I’d known that you survived, you know I would have -”

Bucky shushed him. “I know. I know. It sounds like you didn’t get much of a chance though, did you?”

Bucky’s voice was so soft, so understanding, that Steve felt a wave of guilt and shame slam into him. He’d given up. Back then the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind that Bucky, human Bucky, could have survived something like that and that was why… And then he woke up in a new century and he still hadn’t thought to look for his best friend, just accepted the fact that he was dead. Instead he’d been alive all this time, trapped under all that ice and snow.

Steve couldn’t say anything, just held Bucky tighter and thanked god that Bucky was letting him, that he was here, that this was real. He held him for a long time, until he finally noticed that something was off about the way that Bucky was holding him back, like he was only hugging him with one arm. Bucky was a great hugger, the type that wrapped you up and kept you safe and guarded you with his whole body against whatever was making you sad. It didn’t make sense for him to only use one arm. Steve pulled away again.

“You felt it, huh?” Bucky asked with a crooked smile. There was something pained about it that immediately put Steve on edge. He was about to ask when Bucky simply pushed his left shoulder forward, showcasing the lack of arm attached below his mid bicep. Steve blinked. He hadn’t even noticed.

“Are you okay, Buck?” he asked softly. A stupid question, he knew, but he couldn’t help himself. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

Bucky shook his head. “Nah. It’s just...you know.” He shrugged and Steve could see then how much it was affecting him, how he was doing his best to just roll with the punches as always. “Aw, don’t give me that face, Rogers. Besides, Stark already said he was building me a new one.”

Steve let out a surprised bark of laughter, which made Bucky smile. “Of course he is. I’m not even surprised. Just don’t let him go too crazy with it, okay? He’ll want to put lasers and all kinds of things in it and he literally doesn’t know when to stop himself.”

“I don’t know,” Bucky drawled, “lasers sound pretty great.”

Steve just laughed and shook his head. He couldn’t stop staring at him, drinking Bucky in after two years without him. Everything that he’d experienced in this new, crazy world he’d always thought ‘Bucky would love this’ or ‘I wish I could tell Bucky about this’ and now he could. He had no idea where to begin.

“How long have you been...awake, I guess?” Steve asked. It couldn’t have been long, he assumed, although Clint had told him Tony had been trying to reach him since the _Lemurian Star_ mission. Damn, that seemed like a lifetime ago. 

“Only a few hours,” Bucky responded casually. His shrug was awkward, put off balance by the unequal weight distribution. “I met Stark and a couple of his scientists. And JARVIS.”

Steve grinned. “Pretty crazy, right?”

“Yeah,” Bucky laughed. “Your shower is amazing though. And this apartment! You’re living the high life here in the future, punk.”

“Pepper and I designed it, actually. Tony only really knows how to show affection by throwing money at things or building something for someone, so he built all of us a floor in the tower.”

“Who’s Pepper?”

“Oh, she’s Tony’s…” He paused, unsure. Girlfriend? Wife? Impulse control? “She’s to Tony what you are to me, I guess.”

Steve couldn’t read the look on Bucky’s face. “And what’s that?”

Steve gave a helpless little shrug. “I’m not sure there are words for that. Everything. Mostly she keeps Tony from doing anything too stupid or dying, which, you know, was your job for a long time.”

“Still is.”

Steve beamed. “Yeah. Yeah, still is.” He cleared his throat. “Are you hungry? I don’t have a lot of food here since I’ve been in DC for a while, but I know I should have something. Or I could show you around the tower? Or we could just talk?”

Bucky shook his head fondly and held up his hand to stop Steve from making any more suggestions. “I already raided your kitchen. I actually left you some, if you’re hungry. I think I’ve kinda had enough for today though, if that’s okay. I mean, we can talk, but I don’t really want to go out anywhere.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Steve agreed readily. He remembered what it was like for him that first day out of the ice. Ironically, he’d just wanted to sleep. “I’m glad you found some food. Did you get enough?”

Bucky smiled at him indulgently. “Yeah, I did. I’m not sure if you’ve forgotten, but I can actually take care of myself.”

Steve blushed. “Right, yeah. I just meant. You know. I wasn’t sure what was here.”

“Go get the food I left you. I heard you were injured earlier and I know that means you need a lion’s share of food to make up for it.”

Steve grinned and walked over to the kitchen, feeling like he was practically floating. When was the last time he’d had a meal cooked for him by Bucky? Not since before the war. He opened the oven door, feeling a wave of deja vu despite the vastly different setting, and pulled out the plate of spaghetti before joining Bucky at the table, digging in with a happy noise.

“Jeez, Steve, when’s the last time you ate?”

Steve shrugged and didn’t look up from his food. To be honest, he hadn’t even thought about it before Bucky asked. He’d been so upset after his conversation with Clint and his mind so occupied with his upcoming conversation with Pierce that he hadn’t gone for his run this morning. Which meant he hadn’t had his shake either. He took another bite of the spaghetti and glanced up to see Bucky giving him one of his appraising looks. He swallowed quickly and changed the subject.

“There’s so much about the future that I think you’re gonna like, Buck. I kinda want to show you everything but I’m not sure where to start.”

“I can’t wait.” Bucky’s smile was soft and genuine and Steve felt a gentle warmth spread through his veins.

Then Steve remembered everything that had happened today and frowned. As much as seeing Bucky had immediately made him want to hole up in his apartment for the foreseeable future and forget about everything else, the truth was that something was deeply wrong with SHIELD and now they knew he was going to come after them.

“What is it, Stevie?”

He wanted to smile at the familiar nickname, but his lips twisted instead as he considered what he needed to do. “There’s...something I need to take care of before we can do any of that. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I got close enough today to spook them and make them try to kill me.”

“Who?” Bless his best friend for pushing past his obvious concern to focus on the task at hand. Steve could see the steely edge in Bucky’s eyes that reminded him that Bucky was still one hundred percent Sergeant Barnes, a soldier ready to do whatever was necessary.

“SHIELD. It’s...they’re an organization Peggy started after the war to go after HYDRA. I think they’re compromised.”

“So what are we gonna do?”

Steve looked at him. ‘We.’ No hesitation, no doubts. He’d just woken up from being frozen at the bottom of a mountain a few hours ago and already he was willing to back Steve up in whatever he’d gotten himself into. He bit his lip to keep the tears away and forced himself to focus.

“I need to talk to Nat. And I’ll need to bring in the team, eventually.”

“So you got a new team, huh?”

Steve frowned. “Yeah. It wasn’t...I mean, we were sort of forced together at first when aliens attacked New York, but now we’re pretty solid.”

Bucky stared at him. “Aliens.”

“Yep,” he grinned, popping the ‘p’ in the same way Tony does, just because he knew it was obnoxious.

Bucky was shaking his head. “You don’t know how to live a quiet life, do you? Your ma always said you were a trouble magnet and I think that magnet just grew when you got bigger. Now you’re fightin’ aliens and friends with people like Tony Stark, who - that’s Howard’s kid, right? I’ve just been assuming.”

“Yeah, he’s Howard’s son. I wouldn’t...I wouldn’t bring up Howard around Tony though. I don’t think Howard was a great father.”

Bucky frowned. “He was eccentric as all hell but he seemed like a good man.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t. I’m just saying you’ve met Tony.”

“Right.” Bucky’s frowned. Then he seemed to shake himself out of it and changed the subject. “So basically what I’m sayin’ is that you haven’t kept yourself out of trouble at all since they dragged your ass out of the arctic.”

Steve smiled impishly. “Not at all,” he agreed. “Actually I’ve probably been worse without you around.” He tried to ignore the tiny catch in his voice as the words came out truer than he’d intended.

“Well, lucky for you I’m back to watch your six. And haul you by your scruff whenever you start doin’ somethin’ dumb.”

“Lucky me.”

They moved over to the couch and Bucky caught him up on everything that had happened since he woke up, specifically the things he’d learned from JARVIS. He’d apparently already received a crash course in the past seventy years of history, plus a rundown of how most of the appliances worked in the apartment. 

“I was glad that we won the war. Not that I expected differently, but it was still good to hear. And that apparently you and I were the only Howlies to not make it out. JARVIS said that Morita is a grandpa now. Or, would be, I guess.” He paused solemnly. “I heard Monty had a couple kids, too. None of the others though.”

“Yeah. Gabe is still alive. He’s living in Fiji though, retired.”

“That sounds nice,” Bucky said with a snort. Steve smiled in agreement before they both sobered again. “Becca got married. Two kids. She died five years before they pulled you out of the ice.”

“I know,” Steve said gently, pulling Bucky in with an arm wrapped around his shoulders. “I know.”

They sat in silence for a long time after that, just taking comfort in being close.

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

Steve was already up and making breakfast by the time Bucky managed to stir himself awake. They’d stayed up late last night, talking about the war, all the lives and deaths they’d missed while being frozen, Steve’s new team. Steve hadn’t been able to move far from him, needing to see him or, preferably, touch him at all times. Bucky understood. For him, it had felt like no time at all since that railing had broken and he woke up in that too bright room. For Steve though, it had been a lot longer and he’d believed Bucky to be dead that whole time. It wasn’t like he minded a clingy Steve anyway.

He stretched and rolled off the bed to his feet. Steve had warned him that the bed might feel too soft or the apartment too quiet, but after the whirlwind day he’d had, his body and mind were both exhausted enough to allow him to drift off almost as soon as his head hit the pillow in the guest room Steve led him too.

“Morning!” Steve said brightly when he saw Bucky shuffle in. He was flipping eggs in one pan and keeping an eye on some sizzling bacon in another. “Coffee’s on the counter over there.”

Bucky made a beeline in the direction of Steve’s head nod and poured himself a cup. It was leagues better than anything they’d gotten in rations and smoother than any coffee he’d ever had - period. He downed one cup and poured himself another before sitting on a stool by the little island behind Steve. A bowl of fruit sat in the middle which hadn’t been there last night and he stole an apple.

He sank his teeth into the crisp fruit and let the juice flow down his chin as he relished in eating actual, fresh food that wasn’t from a can. He would not miss military rations, that’s for sure. He made swift work of the apple as he watched Steve flit around the kitchen, pulling together a massive breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, and bowls of what Bucky was pretty sure was yogurt. He started to wrinkle his nose, but then Steve began pouring honey, berries, and granola on top so Bucky decided to reserve judgement.

Steve set the plates down in front of him with a flourish before grabbing his own coffee and sitting down. “Bon appetit.”

“When’d you become a gourmet chef?” Bucky asked, taking a huge bite of wonderfully seasoned egg. They hadn’t had the money for a whole lot of spices when they were living on their own, but Bucky’s mom had always used a lot of them when cooking and would send him home with some every time he visited. Steve had clearly taken advantage of his newfound wealth to make sure his kitchen had a well stocked spice rack.

“Bruce, actually. He’s found a lot of ways to keep himself calm over the years and cooking is one of his favorites. He taught me some things. Plus it’s not hard to make eggs and bacon, Buck.”

“No, but you’ve just never done it.” Bucky shoved three pieces of bacon in his mouth at the same time, just to watch Steve’s indignant expression turn to disgust.

“That’s because you’re a tyrant in the kitchen. Never let me help you.” He stabbed a bit of egg and scooped it onto his toast, the heathen. “Had to learn for myself.”

Well didn’t that just make Bucky feel guilty. He swallowed his bacon and took a sip of the heavenly coffee. “And what’s with the yogurt? It looks fancy as hell.”

Steve grinned at him and Bucky forgot what he was feeling bad about. “Oh, you can blame Pepper for that. She took me out for breakfast once and made me try it. It’s Greek yogurt, which has more protein apparently, and then you just add whatever you want on top.”

“What’s so special about how the Greeks make their yogurt? What’s wrong with American yogurt?”

Steve laughed. “Nothin’. I mean, American yogurt tends to have more sugar. I just like how this one tastes better.”

Bucky nodded and took a bite. He had to admit, it wasn’t nearly as bad as he was expected. The yogurt itself was tangy and slightly bitter, but it balanced with the honey and berries. The granola was sweet too, and crunchy, so overall it was actually really good. He took another bite and rolled his eyes and Steve’s satisfied grin.

Breakfast was finished in record time and Bucky had to shove Steve bodily out of the kitchen to allow him to do the clean up. Steve left with a pout that should have looked incongruous on a man built like a tank, but somehow didn’t. Bucky shook his head and washed their plates, losing himself for a few moments in the familiar task.

He was brought out of his reverie by JARVIS announcing that a visitor was requesting access to Steve’s apartment. He dried his hands and walked towards the entryway.

“What kind of visitor, JARVIS?” Steve seemed tense.

“Ms. Romanov would like to speak with you, sir.”

Bucky saw Steve’s lips tighten, his shoulders straightening, before he gave JARVIS permission to let whoever ‘Ms. Romanov’ was in. The name seemed vaguely familiar and he thought Steve might have mentioned her last night when talking about his team, but if so why was he so on edge? The elevator doors opened and Bucky wished he had a weapon in his hand, but Steve wasn’t armed either so he forced himself to relax his hands and watch the beautiful, redheaded woman who entered the apartment.

She moved with a deadly grace, almost like a ballerina except that he could already see no less than five weapons on her. He knew better than to assume she was less of a threat just because she was a woman. He watched warily as she approached Steve, barely glancing at Bucky, and they stared at each other for a moment.

“You still angry with me, solnishka?”

Bucky could see the bond between them as Steve fought to hold onto whatever he was angry about but was clearly struggling. He tried not to feel jealous about it.

“Depends. How much did you know when Fury gave you that assignment?”

“Only that it was critical and he needed it off the books. I had no idea about Pierce and the rest of them.” She maintained eye contact, clearly wanting Steve to believe her. Steve let out a breath and then nodded, some of his tension releasing. She smiled.

“Natasha, this is Bucky, Bucky, Natasha.”

Ah. Steve had told him about a Natasha. Code name Black Widow, primarily a spy but good to have at your side in a firefight. Sharp wit, sharper eyes. He reached out his hand politely to shake and said, “Ma’am.”

Her smile widened as she took his hand. “Oh good, now there’s two of you.” It seemed to be a reference to something he didn’t understand so he shot a confused look to Steve who just sighed in resignation.

She handed Steve something small and silver. He took it with a frown and the look he gave her was indecipherable. It was disconcerting since he’d been able to read Steve better than anyone what felt like hours ago. He’d already noticed so many differences in him, the causes of which he hadn’t been there for, and this was just one more reminder that there were new things he’d have to learn about this new Steve.

“Is this what I think it is?”

“Call it a gift,” Natasha responded cryptically. “Although I suggest looking at it as soon as possible.”

Steve gave her a sharp nod and walked out of the room, leaving him alone with Natasha. He shifted on the balls of his feet, unsure of what to say. He knew that he had a reputation for being a charmer, but he’d barely spoken to a woman who wasn’t in uniform since he’d shipped out for England. He was also almost positive that Natasha wasn’t the kind of dame that responded well to charm.

He was saved from having to come up with anything by Steve suddenly reappearing in the room, something silver and rectangular in his hands. He motioned for them both to follow him over to the couch with a jerk of his head and sat down, opening the silver device and hitting a button to cause it to light up. He typed in a password and stuck one end of the thing Natasha had given him into the side. 

“It’s encrypted,” Steve said, holding the device out for Natasha to take. She accepted it and started typing rapidly. Bucky watched her with interest, quickly realizing that the tiny thing in her hands was similar to the one that he’d seen Fitz and Simmons use, just with a different design and a keyboard. JARVIS had filled him in on a few of the modern inventions, like the device in the living room which he learned was actually a television where you could watch thousands of shows or movies any time you wanted. The robot had talked about computers and their myriad, ubiquitous use, but Bucky had only ever heard of the giant, room-sized computers the Army used in some location he’d never seen. Stark had never even used anything that sounded like what JARVIS was describing. Still, he was fairly certain this was the thing JARVIS had meant.

“Fury was right about that ship, somebody's trying to hide something. This drive is protected by some sort of AI, it keeps rewriting itself to counter my commands,” Natasha commented distractedly, still typing.

“Can you override it?”

“The person who developed this is slightly smarter than me.” She paused to look up and give them a cocky smile. “Slightly.”

He decided that he might actually like her.

“I'm gonna try running a tracer. This is a program that SHIELD developed to track hostile malware, so if we can't read the file, maybe we can find out where it came from.”

A map appeared on the screen, growing larger as it narrowed in on the place she was trying to find. A dot appeared in New Jersey and he couldn’t help his instinctual grimace. Of all the places…

“You know it?” Natasha asked, and Bucky realized that Steve was looking at the little dot with a faraway expression.

“I used to,” Steve said. “I think we need to bring Tony in on this.”

Natasha pursed her lips as though she was going to object but then nodded. She typed something else, the keys clicking rapidly beneath her short-clipped nails, and then tapped the little square below the keys a few more times before taking out the little silver device from the side of the computer and handing it to him. He stood, but hovered near the couch without moving towards the door, obviously reluctant to leave Bucky’s side. He could see one of Steve’s hands twitch, as though wanting to reach out and touch.

“You guys mind waiting here for a minute?” Steve asked. The wording included them both, but he was mostly looking at Bucky. 

“Go on,” Bucky assured him, “I’m sure I can handle entertaining a pretty lady for a few minutes while you do what you gotta do.”

Steve gave him a small smile and hesitated for another brief moment, before steeling himself and walking quickly toward the elevator, which opened smoothly as he approached. He stepped on and then was gone.

“So,” Natasha said casually, “I was thinking of a trade.”

His eyebrows rose. “A trade?”

Her grin was dangerous. “I’m sure you’ve got all kinds of fun stories about Steve before he went into the ice. I’ll tell you a story about him after, you tell me a story from before.”

He laughed, surprised. “You just want ammo against him.”

“Absolutely.”

He returned her grin. He _did_ want to know more about what Steve had been up to for the past two years, and Steve had already told him that he trusted her. “Alright, then.”

She spun in place and crossed her legs on the couch, facing him with an eager expression that caused him to laugh again. “You first,” she demanded.

He furrowed his brow and thought. “Well, there was this one time…”

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

Steve fidgeted in the elevator, feeling restless and more awake than he’d been in two years. His anger felt like a living thing inside him, twisting and burning with its intensity. Mostly, he was infuriated and offended that HYDRA would take something that Peggy had created, something designed to destroy them, and try to make it their own. It was a perversion that sickened him and made him want to claw out every shred of HYDRA from the organization with his bare hands.

Then there was the timing. All of this would have been bad enough six months ago, but now? Bucky was returned to him through some kind of cosmic miracle that he didn’t think he deserved, though Bucky undoubtedly did, and all he wanted was to spend some time relishing in his presence, showing him all of the things Steve actually liked about this new time. Instead, he was gearing himself up to take on an enemy he’d thought was already defeated years ago. He wanted to punch something.

“Heya, Cap!” Tony greeted as he got off the elevator. “Sorry, I’d stand and sing the national anthem but I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

Steve could see what it was that Tony was working on and it served to immediately bank the fire of his anger. He was reminded of why his best friend was sitting upstairs, healthy and alive. Tony talked a big game and cringed away from any sort of emotional vulnerability, but he was a good man. A man who had gone above and beyond to bring Steve a miracle he had never imagined possible.

“Tony.” His voice was quiet and it quivered slightly with the force of his emotions.

Something in his tone made Tony pull his hands out of the hologram he was manipulating and turn around. “Oh, god, did someone die? Is your boyfriend okay? Tell me the bad news, make it quick, like a band-aid.”

“I just first wanted to say _thank you_ ,” he said sincerely, ignoring Tony’s rising panic. “For searching, for finding him. You brought him back to me and I -” His voice broke so that he could no longer continue, but he hadn’t shed any tears yet, which he assumed was the only reason Tony hadn’t fled the room.

“Don’t get all weepy on me, Cap. Blame it on your damn puppy eyes. Anyone would want to do something to make you less miserable for their own sanity.”

Steve smiled a little and stepped forward, causing Tony to narrow his eyes warily. “Deflect all you want, Stark. I know what a good person you are. And you better get ready because I’m gonna hug you.”

“Oh no, that’s not necess-” He was cut off by Steve’s arms wrapping around him and pulling him into a brief, though sincere embrace. “If I knew this would be my punishment I wouldn’t have done it,” Tony grumbled.

“Shut up, Stark.” Thankfully, Tony listened and endured the hug for the fifteen seconds it lasted before pulling back with a small cough and focusing his attention on the hologram of the prosthetic arm he was engineering. 

“Did you just come down here to cuddle or did you have an actual reason?”

Steve grimaced. “I need your help.”

That got Tony’s attention. He looked up with eager, curious eyes. “Must be pretty serious if you’re asking for help. No offense but you’re definitely the ‘suffer alone’ type.”

“Takes one to know one,” Steve responded wryly.

“Touché.”

Steve took a deep breath and decided to just dive in. Rip off the band-aid, as Tony had said. “HYDRA has infiltrated SHIELD.”

Tony stilled. Steve hadn’t even realized how much he was moving until suddenly he wasn’t anymore. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means exactly what I said. We can be pretty sure of a few members, Alexander Pierce, Brock Rumlow, most of the STRIKE agents, but we don’t yet know the full scope.”

“That certainly goes a long way to explaining your swan dive yesterday. I mean, I figured you had a good reason but it seemed a little dramatic, even for you.”

Steve felt a flicker of amusement, but he simply nodded in agreement with Tony’s words. “Yeah. I took out an elevator full of STRIKE agents, but then I was cornered. I was pretty sure I’d be alright if I jumped, but I was certain I’d be captured if I didn’t.”

Tony’s hands paused briefly where he was once again fiddling with the hologram before resuming their work. “Pretty sure?” he asked evenly.

Steve just hummed in response and changed direction. “Natasha recovered some SHIELD files from the Lemurian Star during our last mission. The files are encrypted and she can’t break through, but she managed to find where the information came from.”

He knew Tony was aware of the blatant deflection, but was glad when he let it go. “So you need my help decrypting these naughty SHIELD secrets? I would be delighted.”

Steve smirked and set the flashdrive down on the table within Tony’s reach. “I had a feeling you’d be interested.”

Tony moved the drive to the middle of the table, dismissing the prosthetic designs, and started giving instructions to JARVIS. Steve decided to leave him to it and left with a promise to check in later. Tony barely heard him and only managed a mumbled reply before focusing back on his new project. Steve shook his head fondly and stepped back into the elevator.

“Captain Rogers, if I may, there was a call that came in for you while you were in conference with Mr. Stark. I have a message to pass on from a Mr. Sam Wilson.”

Steve winced. He had broken his phone during his fall and he had no doubt that news of what had happened had somehow reached Sam by now. He’d seen civilians with their phones out filming him after he’d managed to push himself to his feet. He wasn’t sure how much had made it to the news, but it would definitely be on social media by now. “Can you hold the elevator and play the message please?”

“Of course, sir.” The elevator slid to a smooth stop. He had a feeling that Sam was going to give him a tongue lashing to rival his ma and that was something he didn’t want an audience for, even if it was just Nat and Bucky.

“Hey Steve,” Sam’s voice came from the hidden speakers. Steve swallowed at the tiny tremor in Sam’s voice. They weren’t the closest of friends, but Sam was pretty much the only person Steve had outside of the team. “You better be okay. I assume your phone didn’t survive that impact and that’s why you’re not answering me, though I’m not sure how the hell _you_ did. I saw those videos. I’m not sure how high up you were when you jumped, but damn it, man. We’ve talked about how you’re not invincible. Call me back.”

Steve sighed and ran a hand over his face. “JARVIS, I need to take a detour. Drop me off on the communal floor. Is there anyone using the conference room?”

“Conference room four is currently not in use, Captain.” The elevator doors opened to reveal the large, comfortable space that had been built for the Avengers’ collective use. It contained a spacious living room with a couch so huge it was more like several beds pushed together with a padded backrest and an armrest on each side. A flatscreen TV took up most of the wall opposite the couch and the living room floor was covered in huge, comfy pillows on top of a thick, plush carpet. So far the whole team had only used the room a handful of times for movie nights, but it had been enjoyable each time. There was also a kitchen, a bathroom so large it felt more like an ornate locker room, a game room, and a conference room. Steve headed for the large, glass-walled room that had a long, mahogany table taking up most of the space. The room was soundproof and the glass could be frosted by JARVIS, which was one of the reasons Steve liked it. He stepped inside, pressed the button to cause crystalline fog to obscure the clear walls. He pulled out his new phone, already provided by Tony, and dialed Sam’s number from memory.

“Steve! You asshole.”

Steve couldn’t help but chuckle. “How’d you know it was me? Is that how you greet your phone any time you pick up?”

Sam’s scowl was nearly audible. “I don’t get many calls from unknown numbers with New York area codes. Also if it wasn’t you I was gonna come up there myself and kick your ass.”

Steve laughed again, slightly more relaxed but still contrite as he said, “Sorry, Sam. You were right, my phone didn’t make it.”

“No shit. Most objects - and people - don’t survive things like that. What were you thinking? Gave me a damn heart attack.”

“I’m sorry, Sam,” he said sincerely. Part of him was still a little surprised at how much Sam cared, but Sam had proven that he cared about all the vets that come to those meetings, always following up and making sure they were alright. He was touched to be included. “I didn’t have much of a choice at the time. I should have let you know I was alright.”

“Nah, man, I get it. It’s probably crazy for you after all that.”

“You have no idea,” Steve agreed.

“It’s about to get worse, isn’t it?”

Steve smiled ruefully, although Sam couldn’t see him. “Yeah, it is.”

“Well if Captain America needs my help, I don’t mind dusting off my wings.”

“Thanks, airman. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. Look, I’ll let you get back to putting out fires, I just wanted to make sure you were still in one piece.”

“More or less,” Steve assured him. “And thanks, Sam. For calling.”

“No need to thank me for that. Just know you don’t have my permission to die, so you gotta avoid unnecessary risks.”

“Understood,” he responded somberly, his mouth quirking up in a tiny smile. “Talk to you later, Sam.”

“Good luck.”

Steve hung up and sighed, tipping his head back toward the ceiling. He was so tired. He just wanted to sleep, or maybe grab Bucky and go off the radar somewhere, drink in some peace like Gabe was doing in Fiji. He straightened his posture and let out another tense breath. That wasn’t in the cards for him though, so he’d just have to push on, like he always did. He turned on his heel and left the room, heading for the elevators to start pulling together a plan with Nat and Bucky’s help.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick note about my headcanon regarding Steve and Bucky during private moments: I think they're the type to be brutally honest with each other. Like, to the point of oversharing sometimes and not worrying about stepping on each other's toes. They've just known each other too long to ever bullshit about anything and they would also be each other's safe spaces, ya know?  
> Anyway, that's my two cents. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

> "It's not fair, oh, it's not fair how much I love you  
> It's not fair, 'cause you make me ache, you bastard"  
> And he'll say  
> "Oh, how, oh, how unreasonable  
> How unreasonably in love I am with everything you do  
> I'll spend my days so close to you
> 
> _Fair - The Amazing Devil_

Natasha’s laugh was far less elegant than he expected from someone who seemed so effortlessly poised. Even partially draped over the armrest of Steve’s comfortable couch, snorting in her amusement, there was still an element of control he could detect, as though she was allowing just this much calculated intimacy between them. “I can’t believe Captain America stole socks from unwitting civilians.”

Bucky smirked. “In his defense, Dum Dum had been complaining for three days straight and we were in German-occupied France at the time. We couldn’t exactly walk up to someone’s front door and requisition supplies. Plus, it would be another week before we were back on a US Army base. Steve reasoned that they wouldn’t miss a few pairs of socks too badly.”

Natasha snickered and shook her head, sipping at her second cup of tea. Steve had been gone for about half an hour now and they’d already shared a few decent stories each. Bucky hadn’t been pleased to learn about the fact that Steve now seemed allergic to parachutes, but he was amused by the whole “Twitter drama” as Natasha had described to him. The Internet was apparently a whole new battlefield for Steve to let loose some of his anger regarding social justice.

“Alright, your turn,” Bucky prompted, sipping at his own tea. Steve hadn’t even been gone a whole minute before Natasha had made herself at home and started making cups of tea for them both. Bucky wasn’t sure if it was a sign of her familiarity with Steve’s apartment, a show of dominance, or just that she was such a good spy that her intel included the location of the tea bags and mugs. He decided it was safest not to ask.

Natasha tilted her head to the side slightly in thought. “I told you about Steve getting into a fight with that idiot on Twitter about the legalization of gay marriage?” Bucky gave a small hum of acknowledgement. He was far from surprised at Steve’s reaction, especially since Natasha said there were something like fifteen states now where two fellas or two dames could get married legally and that was something that a lot of people in their old neighborhood would have given a lot to see. Bucky hadn’t grown up in the same area as Steve, his family having had a bit more money than most, but he’d spent enough time at the Rogers’ apartment to have gotten to know Mark, who was also known as Lucille on Friday and Saturday nights, and a few other Brooklyn Heights natives. Then when he and Steve had lived together, they’d gotten an apartment on Middagh Street. Safe to say neither of them was ignorant about the queer - er, gay? - community. 

“Well,” she said, pulling her legs up under her to sit more comfortably, “the conservatives were already upset about this, since Captain America is supposed to represent  _ their _ values and not  _ liberals’ _ .”

Bucky couldn’t help his snort. Anyone who thought that was a damn fool. Natasha grinned at him, reaffirming his positive opinion of the woman.

“I know. Anyway, the dust had barely begun to settle on all of that, partially thanks to Stark’s PR team, when someone directly asked Steve what he thought about immigration.”

“Why do I get the feeling that people are even less friendly towards immigrants than they used to be?” Bucky asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Because you are a smart man, James Barnes.” He shook his head. He’d been trying over the course of their entire conversation to get her to call him ‘Bucky’ but she insisted on calling him James for some reason. “I think you can imagine what Steve’s response was.”

“Let me guess,” he said dryly, “something about this nation being built by immigrants and the fact that his mother was from Ireland?”

“Basically. His response started a Twitter war that lasted three days before Pepper finally managed to get him to calm down and get off the app for a while. Ironically though, his approval ratings skyrocketed after that with the public. There are still a few very loud voices calling for his head, but they are definitely the minority.”

“When you say calling for his head…”

“Not literally,” she reassured him. “Mostly just saying he should give the shield to someone else whose values align more with theirs. Only ones trying to kill your boy are HYDRA these days. And a few other organizations.”

“Comforting.”

She gave him a closed lip smile and finished the last of her tea. “Elevator is on its way back up,” she said casually. He strained his ears and heard the faintest whir of gears that indicated she was correct. “It was nice to hear a bit about Steve before the Valkyrie. He’s so...reserved now. Controlled. It’s hard to imagine him the way you described.”

Bucky frowned. “It sounds like he still gets into stupid fights, the way he always did. It’s just not in back alleys anymore. War changes everyone.”

He wasn’t sure which of them he was trying to convince.

The elevator doors slid open and Steve stepped into the entryway, looking wearier than when he left. He walked straight over to the couch and dropped down next to Bucky, close enough to nearly be on top of him, and leaned his head back against the cushion.

“That rough?”

“Tony’s decrypting the file now. Barely had to ask him, actually.”

“I’m not surprised,” Natasha said carefully, leaning forward. “What else happened?”

Steve cracked open one eye to look at her. “Sam called.”

Bucky couldn’t recall much information about Sam. He knew that he wasn’t on Steve’s team, that he met him in DC, and that he was a former soldier. Yet something in the way he said the man’s name now and the way Natasha’s expression changed implied a much deeper connection than was conveyed to him last night. The jealousy he’d tried not to feel towards Natasha was nothing compared to what he was currently experiencing. He did his best to not let it show on his face.

“I take it he saw the videos?”

Steve groaned and shut his eyes again. “The last time I was chewed out that badly was when Buck…” His eyes suddenly flew open again and he looked over at Bucky with an almost guilty expression. Bucky’s eyes narrowed. There were plenty of times in their lives when Bucky had yelled at Steve for doing something boneheaded, but he was pretty sure he knew what Steve was referring to.

Three weeks before the train, the Commandos had been sent on a mission to clear out a HYDRA base that was rumored to house some of their most experimental weaponry. Steve, the hard-headed bastard, had ended up separated from everyone else and blew up the base while he was still inside. Bucky had screamed himself hoarse after that, once they pulled him out and ripped the freaking rebar out of Steve’s body in order for him to heal. It was above and beyond the  _ dumbest _ move Steve had made in his entire life and had also scared Bucky so badly his hands had shook for days.

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say this has somethin’ to do with the idiot thing everyone’s been sayin’ you did while I was wakin’ up?”

“Uh. Maybe?” Steve picked his head up off the cushion and swallowed heavily. “For the record, I’ve already been reamed out by both Tony and Sam so it’s really -”

“What,” Bucky interrupted, “did you do?”

“He jumped out of a building from about forty stories. Wanna see a video?” Natasha answered gleefully. She held out her phone and started playing the video for him before he could even answer. He watched in full technicolor as Steve plummeted, limbs spread like a starfish, before he curled himself on top of his shield to brace for the impact of hitting the glass roof below him and finally the marble floor beneath. The video went on to show the first few seconds of Steve laying there stunned before finally uncurling with stifled grunts and stiff, pained motions to try and stand.

Bucky turned and looked at Steve very slowly. 

“Okay,” Steve said, stalling, “I know it looks bad, but the circumstances -”

“It looks bad!? Steve, I don’t know when you got it inta your thick skull that you’re some kinda immortal demi-god but you’re not! You coulda died!”

Steve winced. “I know. I know that. Sam said pretty much the same thing.” Bucky took back some of the negative thoughts he’d been having about this Sam guy; it sounded like he was going to be an ally. “But if I hadn’t jumped, they woulda captured me and that woulda been worse, trust me.”

Natasha stood up. “I’m gonna go, let you guys sort this out.”

“Wait!” Steve cried, almost desperately. It was a futile effort; Natasha couldn’t save him from hearing Bucky out. “We gotta figure out what to do about HYDRA.”

“If you think bringing up HYDRA is gonna distract -”

“No!” Steve protested quickly. “I mean, maybe a little. But truly, there were a dozen agents in that elevator and Bruce said that the shock sticks they used were calibrated specifically for me, which is why they burned me through the suit. And those cuffs would have definitely worked if they’d gotten both of ‘em on.”

Natasha paused, making a face. She looked over at Bucky, which surprised him, but he gave her a small nod. He could always yell at Steve later. He hadn’t known about the burns or the specially designed cuffs that would  _ actually work on Steve holy fuck _ . He took a deep breath. Had he really only woken up twenty-four hours ago? If it weren’t for the visible proof that it was no longer the 1940s and his missing arm, he’d almost feel like no time had passed at all. It was disorienting.

“What are you thinking?” she asked Steve. She had one hand on her hip and one eyebrow raised, challenging him.

Steve’s mouth twisted. “Our first priority has to be making sure those helicarriers don’t get in the air.” Steve gave them both a brief rundown of his interaction with Director Fury, who sounded intimidating as hell but also like the kind of guy whose allegiance you could never be sure of until it came down to the wire. It was clear that most of this information wasn’t news to Natasha, but he didn’t think she realized the extent of it until Steve told her it seemed like the vehicles appeared ready to launch in the next couple of weeks, judging by the rate of construction. It was hard to imagine ships the size Steve was describing flying over the world’s major cities, pointing guns at everyone in the world to force them to comply. It was something straight out of a sci-fi novel.

“Then we expose them,” Steve continued. Publicly. They can’t hide in the dark if we shine a spotlight on them.”

“Do we have to destabilize the whole organization?” Bucky asked thoughtfully. At Steve’s skeptical look, he continued, “I mean, you said this was Peggy’s creation. She made SHIELD to take down HYDRA. It’s not her fault it was infiltrated and it’s a pretty shitty thing to have to her legacy if it gets destroyed when it doesn’t need to be.”

Steve gave him a small smile. “See? This is why I need you around, Buck.”

“One of the reasons, you mean, punk.”

“Jerk,” Steve countered, but he was smiling too hard for the insult to have any weight.

“I think we need to go to that location in Jersey first,” Natasha said, bringing them back to the matter at hand. “See what’s there. By the time we get back, hopefully Stark will be done decrypting those files and we’ll have more intel to work with.”

Steve nodded seriously, his expression sobering. He glanced at Bucky. “I hate to say this but I think you should stay here.”

“What? No! Of course I’m coming with you,” Bucky protested. Frozen for the past seventy years or not, he’d spent his entire life watching Steve’s back and he wasn’t about to stop now.

Steve grimaced. “Buck, you can’t honestly tell me you’ve adjusted to losing your arm yet. And even if you have, you can’t exactly hold a sniper rifle with one hand.” Bucky felt the blood drain out of his face as he looked over at the offending space where his arm should be. He’d forgotten. He’d genuinely forgotten for a moment that he’d  _ lost his damn arm _ . How does that happen?

“Hey,” Steve said gently, touching his shoulder and bringing his attention back from its spiraling descent into madness, “it’s gonna be okay, Buck. I saw some of the designs Tony was working on and it looks like he’s almost done. He really is a genius, even if he doesn’t act like it sometimes.”

Bucky let out a breath. “What does ‘almost done’ mean?” He needed to know if he would be able to physically back Steve up in this fight. If not...well, he didn’t know what he’d do. Possibly literally go crazy.

“If I may,” JARVIS interjected, “Mr. Stark predicts that the latest version, which he has called CyPro T-3267, will be viable. The diagnostics are all positive and the metal he has obtained is light enough to uphold the design without causing stress to the body.”

“CyPro T-3267?” Bucky asked curiously. It all sounded like good news.

“Cybernetic Prosthesis Type 3267.”

Bucky gave a low whistle. “He’s tried this over three thousand times?”

“Yes, sir. To be fair, many of the variations only contained small to moderate modifications. However it has taken Mr. Stark longer than he expected to learn how to properly integrate the neurological and circuit components without causing damage to either the wearer or the technology. Those issues have been addressed, however,” the AI assured him.

Bucky could only shake his head in disbelief. He’d been feeling anxious about regaining full use of both limbs again, but he hadn’t quite understood how much work would go into such a thing. He supposed that the casual way Stark had offered it made him think that it was technology that already existed and that at most Stark was just going to improve on it and go a little nuts with all the extras, like Steve said, with lasers and who knows what else. He had no idea that Stark was having to actually  _ invent _ the technology to create a cybernetic limb. 

“Alright,” Steve said, straightening himself into his ‘Captain America means business’ pose, “keep us updated, JARVIS, both on the decryption and the arm situation. And make sure Tony takes breaks to eat and sleep.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Nat, we should head out as soon as possible. It’s not far to Camp Lehigh so if we leave now there’s a possibility we can be back by dinnertime.”

“That’s optimistic of you,” she responded lightly, but agreed to meet him at the jet in twenty minutes. She left with a flirty wink in Bucky’s direction that he couldn’t help but grin back at.

Steve took a long, steadying breath. “I hate this,” he admitted softly. “I just got you back and now this and I -”

“Who’s the one who was just tellin’ me it’s all gonna be alright, huh?” He nudged Steve’s shoulder, causing him to huff a little and the corners of his mouth to quirk upward as though he was fighting off a smile. “I may not like having to hang back for now, but Natasha seems pretty competent. I’m sure there’s more than enough to keep me busy while you’re gone for a few hours.”

Steve’s mouth twisted again. “I know. I know Nat’s competent, more than competent, in fact, and I know you’ll be alright here, but it’s just…” His voice trailed off and he stared a little helplessly at Bucky, unable to articulate what was going on in his head.

“It’s just what, Stevie?”

He took a deep breath and it was exactly how he used to have to force himself to breathe when his lungs were giving him trouble. A thin stream of air drawn deep into his diaphragm, fighting against his traitorous body’s attempt to sabotage him.

“Two years, Buck,” he said quietly. “Or seventy-two, depending on how you’re counting. I watched you fall and I thought I’d never see you again. I can’t help feeling like...I can’t help bein’ afraid that the second I take my eyes off you again I’m gonna lose you all over again and I won’t survive it, Buck, not a second time, I won’t.”

Bucky swallowed harshly and couldn’t speak. He twisted on the couch so that he could wrap his arm around Steve as tightly as the awkward position would allow. Steve instantly latched onto the offered affection and practically dragged Bucky into his lap to make the hug more comfortable, holding onto him as though he never planned to let go.

“I’m not goin’ anywhere,” Bucky murmured. “I’m here now and God himself couldn’t drag me away, ya hear me? I’m here to stay.”

Steve let out a little sob and squeezed so hard Bucky could hear his ribs creak like the beams of an old ship. He tried to return the pressure with just his right arm, but it didn’t feel like enough. Eventually he pulled back, muttering Steve’s name and trying gently to get him to let go.

“Stevie, Steve, you gotta go. Natasha’s waiting for ya. G’on so you can get back.”

Steve’s eyes were rimmed red and he looked like he wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep. Bucky’s words reminded him of his mission, however, and he pulled himself together with a quick nod. He disappeared into his room and came back two minutes later in his new uniform (which was better than his old one, in Bucky’s opinion, and he could see was designed to actually protect Steve more than draw attention to him) and his shield strapped to his arm.

Steve fiddled with his helmet, his weight shifting on the balls of his feet. He kept glancing between Bucky and the door. Finally Bucky stood up and took the helmet out of his hands, pushing it smoothly over Steve’s short cropped hair until it was snug against his skull.

“Go, Steve,” he said sternly. “Come back safe.”

“Always do,” Steve retorted with a smirk. Bucky shook his head and shoved him toward the elevator. The last thing he wanted was for Natasha to come looking for him. Steve allowed himself to be pushed and stepped into the elevator, keeping eye contact with Bucky until the doors shut and the car started moving toward the roof.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 7 Middagh Street, is where W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, and many other famous gay, queer, and artsy folks lived in the 1940s
> 
> Honestly a weirdly hard part about writing this fic is remembering wtf was happening in the world in 2013/14, like which states had legalized gay marriage.
> 
> Thank you for all your lovely comments! I live for validation tbh


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second half of this chapter is basically just the transcript of the scene from CA:TWS, but with more emotions. It's necessary to the plot though so...here we are.
> 
> Also Bucky and Tony are gonna become bros because I said so and because Bucky is a giant nerd.

> Out of my depth  
>  And I'm holding my breath  
>  Don't wanna go outside the door  
>  Paralysed by my own emotion  
>  Out of my mind looking for a way out of here  
>  Terrified and my feet are frozen  
>  Something inside got me wondering is this real?
> 
> _ Monsters - Seafret _

Bucky stood in the entryway listening to the oppressive silence for a long moment after Steve left. He felt wrong-footed, like when he was thirteen years old and stepped on Mary Williams’ toes and suddenly he’d forgotten how to move his limbs for the rest of the dance. He felt the way he had when he’d forced himself to turn and walk away after hugging Steve the night of his deployment, bereft and terrified and alone.

The hours since he’d first woken up had been such a whirlwind he wasn’t sure the reality of the situation had sunk in yet. Steve was right to say that he hadn’t adjusted to losing his arm; he hadn’t adjusted to anything. In his mind, it was still 1945 and whatever trouble Steve was about to get himself into, Bucky would be right behind him, watching his back through the scope of his rifle. There was a cognitive dissonance the size of the Grand Canyon gaping between his knowledge that most of the Howling Commandos were dead and that it was currently 2013, and the certainty that he would soon wake up on his back in a leaky tent to the sound of Dum Dum making the world’s worst coffee.

He forced himself to take a deep breath. He held it in his lungs for a moment before slowly letting it go. Steve wouldn’t be back for several hours. The best thing for him to do would be to try to get himself used to this new reality. He thought he’d done well with not freaking out about the Ceiling Voice and gathering as much intel as humanly possible in the scant couple of hours he’d had waiting for Steve. The problem was he didn’t know where to go from here. Was he even allowed to leave Steve’s apartment?

He squared his shoulders and looked at the imposing, sleek metal doors of the elevator. They could  _ try _ to keep him locked up in here but he had never been the type to go down without a fight. He took a step forward and braced himself.

“Where would you like to go, Sergeant Barnes?” JARVIS asked, startling him slightly.

He stepped quickly into the elevator car before the doors could shut again. “Uh,” he said eloquently. Where  _ did _ he want to go? “Could I go see how Stark is doing with my, with the arm?”

“Certainly, sir,” JARVIS said smoothly. The car began to move swiftly, but Bucky didn’t even feel the speed. “Fair warning, sir. Mr. Stark tends to get a little...involved when he’s working. He may not be up for interaction.”

“He won’t mind that I’m there, will he?”

“It’s possible he won’t even notice, sir.”

The doors opened before Bucky could respond and he stepped out into a room similar to the one he’d woken up in. At least, in the sense that it was large, high ceilinged, and full of various glass, metal, and robotic objects. This room was far less organized, however. It was chaotic and loud, both from what Bucky assumed was music blaring from somewhere unseen and from just the sheer amount of visual information. He nearly stepped back into the elevator.

What halted him was the hovering, bluish image of a partially disassembled arm. From the bits that were taken apart, he could tell that the inside was composed of wires and various things he didn’t have a name for. It looked complicated, whatever it was, and he found himself drawn forward curiously.

“No, no, scrap that,” Stark muttered. “We want it to move normally, not like fucking tentacles.”

Bucky grimaced. He certainly did not want tentacles attached to him. He was only a few feet away from the table where Stark was working now but, as JARVIS had predicted, the man had yet to notice him.

“Alright, try that. Run the simulation.” Stark reached out for a mug and sipped at it with a grimace. He looked haggard, with deep, purple bags under his eyes and his shirt rumpled and stained in places. “And have someone fetch me another coffee.”

“Certainly, sir,” JARVIS answered. “I would also like to inform you that Sergeant Barnes has arrived.”

Stark startled and turned around quickly. Luckily, it seemed that his mug was empty because no liquid splashed over the rim with his sudden movement.

“The man of the hour!” he exclaimed, throwing an arm out wide. “Excellent! I was just thinking that I’d like to use you as a guinea pig for the last trials. Make sure the measurements are right and all that. Not that I distrust you, JARVIS,” he added to the AI.

“Of course not, sir.”

Bucky frowned. “Guinea pig? That sounds -”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Stark interrupted quickly. “Completely harmless, I promise. Just need to fit the hologram over your shoulder and make a few adjustments before I move onto production. Maybe take a few scans?”

Bucky looked nervously over at the hovering image Stark had gestured toward and considered. He didn’t think Stark would have put all the effort in to find and resurrect him only to kill him now. Plus Steve seemed to trust him. Still, the whole concept put him on edge. He nodded his assent and Stark beamed, clapping his hands together.

“Great! Take off your shirt.”

Bucky smirked. “Most people at least buy me a drink first.”

Stark barked a laugh. “I’ll get you one after. Can you even get drunk? If you’re anything like Steve, which you’d have to be considering, I’d love a new test subject for the superalcohol. Although, in retrospect, I suppose that didn’t go as well as I’d hoped.”

“You tested alcohol on Steve?” Bucky extrapolated. Why was Steve always so quick to volunteer himself for experiments?

Stark grimaced. “Yes. I anticipated the experience would be a funny anecdote, maybe a video I could use for blackmail purposes later. Instead what I got was the darkest humor I’ve ever heard and a whole lot of mourning. Anyway! Shirt. Off. Now.”

Bucky complied with only brief fumbling. Luckily, removing a shirt with one hand was a lot easier than putting it on. He couldn’t help but frown to himself at the thought of a drunk, depressed Steve. Before the serum, he and Steve had gotten drunk together plenty of times and only seldom had he ever been a sad drunk. Usually, he just became very touchy and handsy, like he was finally allowing himself to want all of the physical affection he denied wanting while sober. 

As soon as the shirt was off and tossed onto a nearby chair - unfolded, since Bucky couldn’t exactly do that at the moment - Stark approached. The floating arm had been reassembled and moved with the movement of Stark’s hands. Bucky tensed, bracing himself to feel whatever it was against his skin, but the light was insubstantial and he felt nothing as Stark fitted it against him and started making adjustments.

“So, how does it work?” Bucky asked.

Stark looked up at him in surprise. “Normally people don’t actually want the answer to that question.”

“Well I do.”

Stark smiled a little and adjusted something else before replying. “Well, it wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you. The human brain is extraordinarily finicky and not at all as reliable as a machine. Plus there’s that whole bit about the right side operating the left, which proved to be more of an obstacle than I expected. Then there was the arm itself! I’m no novice when it comes to robotics, but the individual movements of each finger, getting the joints to move the way they should, plus wiring it all so that you would get sensation...let’s just say it’s a good thing I had the foresight to start this little project before they even dug you out of that mountain.”

“So basically all those wires inside are like nerves?”

“Yes, exactly! Well, no, not exactly, but the principle is there. You see…”

✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪🧊✪

“This is it.” It was eerie being back, the camp that had allowed him to fight for a chance to be chosen for the serum was devoid of life, silent and unwelcoming. It was like a ghost town.

Natasha walked beside him with confident, purposeful steps. She had to quicken her stride to keep up with his longer legs, but she appeared as unruffled as ever. “The file came from these coordinates.”

“So did I,” he said, a bit dramatically. Perhaps this isn’t where  _ he _ , Steve Rogers, came from, but it’s where Captain America was born and sometimes he felt eclipsed by everything he’d had to become. He’d always felt that the name ‘Project Rebirth’ was terribly apt. “This camp is where I was trained.”

“Changed much?” He could tell that she knew how much this was affecting him and was purposefully being nonchalant in response. Sometimes he was overwhelmed with fondness for her.

Steve shrugged, looking around both with nostalgia and to keep an eye out for potential HYDRA agents. “A little.” The truth was that it looked almost exactly the same, which was what was so unsettling. He could see himself as he was before the serum, small and wheezing as he pushed himself to keep up with the others, walking this same path that used to be bustling with activity. He felt the now familiar feeling of displacement, that double vision of himself in the present versus himself then and for a moment he wasn’t sure which one was the truth.

Natasha’s voice brought him out of it. “This is a dead end. Zero heat signature, zero waves, not even radio. Whoever wrote the file must have used a router to throw people off.” She paused when she saw that Steve’s attention had been caught on something ahead of them. “What is it?”

They walked slowly toward the metal building, a feeling of dread growing in Steve’s stomach. “Army regulations forbid storing ammunition within five hundred yards of the barracks. This building is in the wrong place.” It certainly hadn’t been here the last time Steve had been at Camp Lehigh. His eidetic memory was often a curse, but it was also useful sometimes too. He used his shield to brute force their way past the lock on the door and they entered cautiously, alert for any hint of a trap.

“This is SHIELD,” Natasha said quietly. She sounded as shocked as he felt, in her own subdued way. He stared at the logo on the wall.

“Maybe where it started.” It would make sense for Peggy to have started here, a place with such meaning. He tried to imagine her in this place, leading the charge against what remained of HYDRA. It was all too easy to picture, especially once they entered what appeared to be an old office. On the wall were three framed portraits, the one of Howard hanging slightly crooked in the middle.

“There's Stark's father.”

“Howard.” He didn’t believe she didn’t already know that, but he felt that it was important to call him Howard, not ‘Stark’s father’. Especially since the second time he and Tony had gotten drunk together, Tony had been the one to loosen up and spill secrets he would never say aloud if he were sober.

“Who's the girl?” Again, Steve knew that Natasha was aware of who Peggy Carter was and what she looked like, she was just reacting to the fact that Steve couldn’t seem to look away from her photo. She was so young then.  _ He _ had been young then. Technically, he supposed he still was, but he felt ancient and far wearier than any twenty-eight year old had the right to feel. He didn’t bother answering her question, instead turning to walk further down the room. He stopped by a massive book shelf, noticing that the construction seemed off. It didn’t quite fit with the shelves to either side and there was a gap between it and the shelves to the left. He frowned, his feeling of foreboding returning full force.

“If you're already working in a secret office,” he reasoned, pushing his fingers into the gap and wrenching the bookshelf aside, “why do you need to hide the elevator?”

Natasha used an app on her phone, something no doubt designed by Tony, to find the code they needed to access the elevator. The ride down wasn’t nearly as smooth as the elevator in the Tower and Steve found himself wincing at the painful grinding of gears and the ominous cracks and snaps of the cables. They made it safely to the bottom, however, and the doors opened to reveal a room full of computers. He knew enough to realize that these models were old, by at least a couple decades, and the dust covering everything suggested that no one had been down here in quite some time.

“This can't be the data-point,” Natasha said, echoing his point, “this technology is ancient.” As soon as she’d spoken, however, she suddenly noticed a small flash drive port, which she pointed out to Steve. He supposed it indicated some more recent updates to the system, but he couldn’t say for sure. Natasha started messing around with some of the buttons and a couple seconds later all the screens lit up, the machines whirring loudly as the system came online.

The screen in front of Natasha began to fill with a prompt, an electronic voice reading out, “Initiate system?” Natasha typed in an affirmative.

"Shall we play a game?" she asked, modulating her voice to emulate the computer from that movie Tony had bullied him and Bruce into sitting down to watch a few weeks ago. She suddenly seemed to realize that he might not get her reference and it was almost endearing to watch her awkwardly try to explain, “It's from a movie that -”

“Yeah, I saw it,” he said, saving her from describing the whole plot to him.

Before he could say anything else, a horribly familiar voice began to speak. “Rogers, Steven. Born, 1918. Romanov, Natalia Alianovna. Born, 1928.”

Steve raised his eyebrows in surprise. He didn’t know much about Natasha’s past, other than something called the Red Room and that it was a less than pleasant story, but he’d had no idea she was that old. Only ten years younger than him. How did that work? He forced himself to focus, setting aside his questions for later.

Natasha seemed determined to move past the revealed information as well, though he could tell she was rattled. “It's some kind of a recording,” she said, noting the blocky, old camera moving above the screen as it analyzed them.

“I am not a recording, Fräulein,” the computer with Zola’s voice retorted, sounding somehow offended. “I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am…” The voice trailed off to direct their attention to a black and white photo of Arnim Zola. The unease Steve had been feeling solidified into a sickening block of ice. It couldn’t be. SHIELD wouldn’t be this stupid.  _ Peggy _ wouldn’t be this stupid.

“Do you know this thing?” She was watching his face in concern.

Steve had to swallow past the bile in his throat before he could speak. “Arnim Zola was a German scientist who worked for the Red Skull. He's been dead for years.” Or so he thought. His ideas about life and death were becoming murky of late. He walked around the table full of monitors, searching for any indication that Zola was somehow alive and controlling them somehow.

“First correction,” the Zola computer said imperiously, “I am Swiss. Second, look around you. I have never been more alive. In 1972 I received a terminal diagnosis. Science could not save my body. My mind, however...that was worth saving on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain.”

Steve wanted to throw up. He wanted to smash every piece of machinery in this room with his fists. He wanted to burn this whole place to the ground. He wanted to go home and see Bucky. “How did you get here?” he demanded.

“Invited.” If he still had a body, he would have shrugged his shoulders and held out his hands in a guileless gesture. Steve would have killed him, were he a man standing in front of him.

“It was Operation Paperclip after World War II,” Natasha informed him, and his already shattered opinion of the US government blackened even further. “SHIELD recruited German scientists with strategic value.”

“They thought I could help their cause.” Zola said. “I also helped my own.”

Of course he did, Steve thought, his blood heating. “HYDRA died with the Red Skull,” he spat. “And then SHIELD came in and swept up the mess.”

“Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.”

“Prove it,” Steve demanded. He needed to know the extent of the damage.

“Accessing archive.” One of the screens began playing old, colorless footage, starting with an image of Johan Schmidt standing in front of an assembly of soldiers. It was Schmidt as Steve had first met him, with his human mask. “HYDRA was founded on the belief that humanity could not be trusted with its own freedom. What we did not realize, was that if you try to take that freedom, they resist.” The images cut to short clips of Steve leading various charges against HYDRA. He couldn’t place the moment when the footage was taken exactly, but he recognized the feeling in his own face: determination, horror, fatigue, conviction. 

“The war taught us much,” Zola continued. “Humanity needed to surrender its freedom willingly. After the war, SHIELD was founded and I was recruited. The new HYDRA grew. A beautiful parasite inside SHIELD. For seventy years HYDRA has been secretly feeding crises, reaping war. And when history did not cooperate, history was changed.”

Steve listened with mounting revulsion. He couldn’t speak. All this, because he’d crashed his plane into the Arctic? Surely he could have done something. Stopped SHIELD from recruiting Zola, at least.

“That's impossible, SHIELD would have stopped you,” Natasha protested. It sounded like she was trying to convince herself as well.

“Accidents will happen,” Zola responded, a shrug in his voice. The screen flashed images of newspaper headlines, blurry security camera stills, top secret files on various SHIELD agents who had been systematically taken out over the years. Steve’s stomach dropped when one of the headlines was of the car accident that killed Howard and Maria Stark. “HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once the purification process is complete, HYDRA's new world order will arise. We won, Captain. Your death amounts to the same as your Life; a zero sum.”

He knew he shouldn’t, he knew in a logical, calmer part of his mind that Zola was just trying to goad him but the man had found a weak spot and dug in deep. Steve punched the screen, shattering it and making the pixelated, scattered face in it disappear.

A moment later, another screen lit up with the same face. “As I was saying…”

Steve stepped forward angrily, just barely keeping himself from punching this screen as well. “What’s on that drive, the one you encrypted?

“Project Insight requires insight. So I wrote an algorithm.”

Natasha picked up on his fraying control and moved quickly to his side. “What kind of algorithm? What does it do?”

“The answer to your question is fascinating. Unfortunately, you shall be too dead to hear it.” Steve realized that the reason why Zola had been so forthcoming wasn’t just his arrogance and need to gloat, but primarily because he’d been stalling. He threw his shield at the rapidly closing doors behind them, but wasn’t fast enough and the shield bounced off the metal, hitting a wall before flying back toward him so he could catch it again. He cursed vehemently.

“Steve.” He turned around to see Natasha looking at her phone in alarm. “We got a bogey. Short range ballistic. 30 seconds tops.”

“Who fired it?”

He did not like her answer. “SHIELD.”

“I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain. Admit it, it's better this way. We're both of us...out of time.”

He ruthlessly shoved aside his desire to punch the screen again, instead focusing on a solution to their immediate problem. He grasped one of the panels of metal grating in the floor covering an empty, rectangular space of unknown purpose. He held out his hand for Natasha and managed to grab her right as the bomb hit the building. He tossed her into the small underground space before leaping after her, his shield held above them to block the majority of the fire and debris. He screamed as he felt the weight of the entire building collapse on top of them, his body shielding Natasha as best he could.

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4HoEMB2E2vl7UO0PaR2v1U?si=8RpzfmwWSVmUaGbgPiZBYA) I've been putting together for this fic


End file.
